Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

Not the eyes, but the heart sees the beauty.

Excited about Black Friday. Also excited about Jew Tuesday.

From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.

There's always going to be a place for YouTube.

The only just literary critic," he concluded, "is Christ, who admires more than does any man the gifts He Himself has bestowed.

Oh Lord, are there really people starving still?

Doing more of what doesn't work doesn't work.

We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.

You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.

The habits and language of clandestinity can intoxicate even its own practitioners.