"[n regard to Jesus believing himself inspired]This belief carried no more personal imputation than the belief of Socrates that he was under the care and admonition of a guardian demon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations while perfectly sane on all other subjects (Works, Vol. Iv, p. 327)."

"This woman is so didactic I think I may scream. If it's bleeding, bandage it. If it's crying, hug it. If it's hopeless, pray for it. If it's dead, resurrect it."

"The institution that had the greatest effect on Berenson's education was the Boston public library, the first in the country that allowed people to take books home to read them."

"A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one."

"The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box."

"You can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next, by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest, by their preference for the discussion of ideas."

"...What does the blessing of heaven mean? We know the kirin is just an animal, not a mythical creature.'It has become a symbol now.... That is the way human beings deal with the world."

"A lot of things that we cannot buy and sell in markets used to be totally legal objects of market exchange - human beings when we had slavery, child labour, human organs, and so on. So there is no economic theory that actually says that you shouldn't have slavery or child labour because all these are political, ethical judgments."