Leon Wieseltier quotes:

There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

What matters to me is that one identifies one's genuine obsessions, one's genuine commitments, one's genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.

Incorruptibility by money is the old story... Now it's incorruptibility by media.

American Jews, like Americans, have a very consumerist attitude toward their identity: they pick and choose the bits of this and that they like.

The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyoneâ??s drunk and ugly and theyâ??re going to pass out in a few minutes.

The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,

Use the new technologies for the old purposes.

It is never long before identity is reduced to loyalty.

A thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy,

Dilettantism is the sort of thing one must avoid.

Her book about the money in sex gives you the feeling of the sex in money.

I do not value religion chiefly for its morality.

No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.

Philip Kitcher has composed the most formidable defense of the secular view of life since Dewey. Unlike almost all of contemporary atheism, Life After Faith is utterly devoid of cartoons and caricatures of religion. It is, instead, a sober and soulful book, an exemplary practice of philosophical reflection. Scrupulous in its argument, elegant in its style, humane in its spirit, it is animated by a stirring aspiration to wisdom. Even as I quarrel with it I admire it.

The world invited me many places.

There are moral religious people and moral secular people, immoral religious people and immoral secular people.