Big ideas — lines worth keeping

The Congo, more than any other colony, was the creation of one man.

Morality represents the way we would like the world to work; economics represents how it actually does.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Maybe ever's just one word, like the sky. Maybe ever means all that is or was or will be.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.

But race is the child of racism, not the father.

History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.

The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out.

Gods are great. But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return.

If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America.

We are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend.

This is the way the world ends. For the last time.

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

A nudge alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options.

The story of the gene is the story of the search for the source and meaning of our identity.

The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.

Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding.

It's not about your character. It's about biology.

The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary.

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women.

Man is not truly one, but truly two.

Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like to not know it.

The region between east and west is the axis on which the globe spins.