Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders.

It's a great event to get outside and enjoy nature. I find it very exciting no matter how many times I see bald eagles.

Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.

Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate.

Each of the world religions has its own particular genius, its own special insight into the nature and requirements of compassion, and has something unique to teach us.

I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.

Compassion is not an option. It's the key to our survival.

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.

Religion isn’t about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.

I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.

Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.

An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.

Journalism has already come to be the first power in the land.

Can't really despise people you don't know.

Feminism was about making women's lives less constrained and giving them more choices.

Machines are the opium of the masses. If all the machines in England were thrown into the North Sea tomorrow, we should be back in the Garden of Eden. And the weather would probably improve.

Despite the fact that I had a writing background, they didn't want to accept whatever ideas I had as a writer.

God is the true realistic point where human reason mostly, if not completely, breaks down.

Peace We passed their graves: The dead men there, Winners or losers, Did not care. In the dark They could not see Who had gained The victory.

I will adhere to the counsels of good men, although misfortune and death should be the consequence.

I can do five things at once. I'm tapping my foot, I'm opening my mouth and talking to you, and looking at the bulletin board.