Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?

There is magic in my universe, but it's pretty low magic compared to other fantasies.

Only great souls know the grandeur there is in charity.

All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.

“To think the way you do,” he said smiling, “you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.” “On both, perhaps.”