The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and to what degree. The sick, the lame, the leper, the ...
I'm convinced that the best solutions are often the ones that are counterintuitive - that challenge conventional thinking - and end in breakthroughs. It is always easier to do things the same old way...why change? To fight this, keep your dissatisfac...
Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect our imaginations. Stories and poetry do that. You need a ...
An Atheist is a person who questions every kind of authority, and this is the thing that is important. Because if we can, without blinking an eye, question the ultimate authority, god - who must be obeyed, then we can question the authority of the st...
...Spinoza’s Conjecture:“Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity. The scientific principle that a claim is untrue unless proven otherwise runs counter to our natural...
Despite all the challenges facing higher education in America, from mounting student debt to grade inflation and erratic standards, our system is rightly the world's envy, and not just because our most revered universities remain on the cutting edge ...
{ } . . . had a philosophy that actually works for human betterment, that dares to challenge the superstition, hypocrisy, and sham, which so often have worked for cruelties, inquisitions, wars and massacres. Superstition that stood across the road of...
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. ...
Like the body craves oxygen, the mind is desperate for certainty. It believes that without a safe foothold on reality, it will die. But the fascinating thing is that the illusion of certainty is exactly the opposite of safety because it hardens and n...
My smile lights up a million stars always. I create beauty with my hands and I radiate beauty from within. I make a fashion statement wherever I go and I always see beauty wherever I go. Life is an experience that brings out the best in me. I triumph...
The greatest challenge that exists in life, in anyone’s life, is that of sustaining a child’s fascination and love for life itself while being bombarded, infiltrated and violated by every possible reason and excuse not to do so. Ultimately, nothi...
You're not the one Teach!! The man roger was waiting for,at the very least,it's not you teach Just as there are people who inherited roger's will... Someday one will carry ace's will... You may eradicate their bloodline ,but their flame never dies......
Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn't fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very gru...
Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution's various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was next to imp...
You don’t hunt something that you can live with, you idiot. You can’t have a challenge for a lifetime, it’ll drain you out. You’ll be dead before you even know it. Someone you go all those miles for, someone you change your own skin for, some...
Liberating ourselves from the traditional strictures of marriage altogether, and/or transforming those strictures to include all of us -- gay, feminist, career-focused, baby crazy, monogamous, non-monogamous, skeptical, romantic, and everyone in betw...
I have a handful of prayers that I pray all the time... One is that God will put my books into the right hands at the right times. I've prayed this prayer thousands of times, and God has answered it in dramatic fashion countless times. The right book...
I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prej...
The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not ca...
It's all well and good to have profound thoughts on a regular basis, but I think it's not enough. Well, I mean: I'm going to commit suicide and set the house on fire in a few months; obviously I can't assume I have time at my disposal, therefore I ha...
Just because I liked something at one point in time doesn’t mean I’ll always like it, or that I have to go on liking it at all points in time as an unthinking act of loyalty to who I am as a person, based solely on who I was as a person. To be lo...
