“People who keep their feelings to themselves tend not to know, after a while, what their feelings are.”

“If you do not have the possibility of abandoning your religion, you do not enjoy the possibility of freely embracing it, either.”

“You can't change the feelingbut you can change your feelings about the feeling in a second or two”

“Negative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis and the new nation [the US] certainly did. . . . The downside . . . is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are, in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real.”

“There is no such thing as a stupid question. Just stupid people who ask questions.”

“Libraries represent the sole contemporary American institution with the potential for making available a wide-ranging, genuinely diverse spectrum of opinions, cultural expressions, and ideas in an environment that is commercial-free and huckster-free, a commons where people can gather and select, in an un-intimidating atmosphere, whatever interests them, delights them, or even repels them--whatever they want to know about.”

“I can't have information I know would be of interest to someone and not share it.”