Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return

Dialogic is not to be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, the love remaining with itself - this is called Lucifer.

I never took a position we were going to be a good ball club. I took the position we were going to be a winning ball club.

Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, 'It will be happier.'

The total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is ... remarkable ... that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of.

Seeing people in person is a big part of how you drive any change process. You have to show people a positive view of the future and say "we can do it"

There is no need to accept the standards of the world at large.

The British have always made terrible parents.

I shoot a lot of video, first of all, whatever I think is interesting, just my travels; hard to say why. If something looks good, I take a picture or try to shoot it.

Work not of enthusiasm but of love, conscious of duty-which means self-denial.