“What was lost on the battlefield was won back in the taverns, classrooms and monasteries of medieval England. The turning point: Geoffrey Chaucer…who says art can’t change the world?”

“Consciousness is an agent of identity, a consequence of identity, and an expression of identity…”

“But what if Jesus is not your cup of tea? There’s an old hymn that goes, ‘Jesus is just all right with me,’ but what if he’s not all right with you?”

“You want me to believe that your God is invisible, that he lives in an empty box…and you want me to worship that box?”

“For 70 years you’ve practiced the ways of others; you have been a loyal member of team Homo, but now it’s back to reality, to yourself alone.”

“World War I, Stalinism, Fascism, the Holocaust, World War II, Hiroshima, the Cold War, Vietnam, and now the new ‘30-Plus Years War’ in the Middle East… Rational Empiricism has compiled quite a resume!”

“You are not Joey...there are no magic kingdoms in your future. No, you are face-to-face with the darkest days of winter.”

“You’ve heard of Occam’s Razor… Occam gives disheveled, often bloated philosophy a good shave. But not good enough!”

“We would not expect to find every human being alive today sharing DNA inherited from one particular ancestral couple, and yet, they do!”

“The only way to conserve the past is to change it (and) the surest way to destroy the past is to preserve it.”

"Not all thoughts come while shaving..."

“In the technical jargon of academia, the mashed potatoes are lumpier than we would have expected.”