Faced with destruction, the Jewish people survived.

Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy.

Frequent worshippers are also significantly more active citizens. They are more likely to belong to community organizations, especially those concerned with young people, health, arts and leisure, neighborhood and civic groups and professional associations.

God is back and Europe as a whole still doesn't get it. It is our biggest single collective cultural and intellectual blind spot.

There's always hope. You can lose everything else in the world, but Jews never lose hope.

Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.

Islamophobia is a complex phenomenon.

Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.

I do not want to suggest that you have to be religious to be moral.

With wealth comes responsibility.

Food prices are often kept artificially high. The result is that the Millennium Development Goals set out by the United Nations at the start of the new millennium are not being reached. Fine words have not yet been turned into deeds.

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.

Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives.

We from every religion feel comfortable in Britain because there is a host. The Church of England is a good host, it has been a major force in shaping England into such a tolerant society.

As the political leaders of Europe meet to save the euro and European Union, so should religious leaders.

I think our people in Britain have a normative expectation of ethical conduct.

We believe that what we possess we don't ultimately own. God is merely entrusting it to us. And one of the conditions of that trust is that we share what we have with those who have less. So, if you don't give to people in need, you can hardly call yourself a Jew. Even the most unbelieving Jew knows that.

Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

There is no greater gift than time.

The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed.

There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn't happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.

It seems entirely possible to me that horrible things can be going on without us becoming horrible people.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.

I have made my own choice, which is vegetarianism, but it's not the choice I'm imposing on anybody else.

I'm less worried about accomplishment - as younger people always can't help but be - and more concerned with spending my time well, spending time with my family, and reading, learning things.

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.

These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long.

Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more.

The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.

In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.

We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.

As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.

I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.

My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.

It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.

When we talk about protecting our right to have guns, we are talking about protecting our right to shoot bullets. So what is it that's so important to shoot at?

How could this world be so unlike the world that I believed I was living in? I can't describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not possess the vocabulary?

For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.

I usually write away from home, in coffee shops, on trains, on planes, in friends' houses. I like places where there's stuff going on that you can lift your eyes, see something interesting, overhear a conversation.

Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don't want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it's also a parent's worst nightmare: That they won't need you. It's like the real tragedy of parenting.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.

To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

We shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's idea of perfection if it will prevent us from taking steps we actively want to take.

As I've grown older, I've grown more convinced there's nothing that shouldn't be talked about. If we think we're protecting each other, we're not.