"But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith."

"Happiness is a real, objective phenomenon, scientifically verifiable. That means people and whole societies can now be measured over time and compared accurately with one another. Causes and cures for unhappiness can be quantified."

"How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?"

"It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy."

"I was in a military family, so by the time I was 13 I'd lived in six different places."

"Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against."

"We are on the precipice of a crisis, a Constitutional crisis. The checks and balances, which have been at the core of this Republic, are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances that say if you get 51% of the vote, you don't get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing, it's almost a temper tantrum."

"Italy has piled up huge public debt because the successive governments were too close to the life of ordinary citizens, too willing to please the requests of everybody, thereby acting against the interests of future generations."