Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.

The thinkers of the world should by rights be guardians of the world's mirth.

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports.

The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.

What we're doing now is we're saying that individual schools can spend the money on their own priorities, so that head teachers can decide what's truly important, because the big shift in approach on education that we're taking - which is different from what happened before - is that we trust teachers and we trust heads.

I was not thinking about infinite multipliers when I was 10. But I did have a father who was a Ph.D. in commerce and finance and an intellectual man. And so I had a feeling, probably about the time I went to college, that I would try to be a scholar and teacher, but I didn't know which field.