“Everyone uses their own dictionary.”

“An interesting captain on there, McNamara. Th e United States Lines had three captains. Every company had their captains that were notorious, and U.S. Lines had McNamara. Later on, McNamara, he dies, and the Wilmington Union Hall for Masters, Mates and Pilots—cuz he was captain, he would come out of that hall—they had a partywhen he died. Baked a cake.It wasn’t every day you got to lose one like him.Some people took this more seriously than others is the only way I can phrase this.”

“The human race puzzles me, with striving for freedom, and then basically just giving it away.”

“The way I always kind of look at it: everything’s important and nothing’s important. If you’re gonna have a drama, have it over something that’s worth the time. Some people take it more seriously than others, like a Lowell. But we all end up the same.”

“The specific use of folks as an exclusionary and inclusionary signal, designed to make the speaker sound like one of the boys or girls, is symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards. Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls (unless the victims are, in fact, little girls and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in the history of the United States before 1980, and you will find not one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: 'We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain; and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”

“We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.”

“If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four.”