I question whether I want to be integrated into America as it stands now, with its complacency and materialism, its soullessness.

A person can run for years but sooner or later he has to take a stand in the place which, for better or worse, he calls home, and do what he can to change things there.

Perhaps she was both child and woman, darkness and light, past and present, life and death - all the opposites contained and reconciled in her.

But sometimes it's necessary to go back before you can go forward, really forward.

Sometimes a person has to go back, really back-to have a sense, an understanding of all that's gone to make them-before they can go forward.

Once a great wrong has been done, it never dies. People speak the words of peace, but their hearts do not forgive. Generations perform ceremonies of reconciliation but there is no end.

A silenced Haiti has once again found its literary voice.

I'll have to as you say take a stand do something toward shaking up that system. ... Despair ... is too easy an out.

Sometimes a person has to go back really back-to have a sense an understanding of all that's gone to make them-before they can go forward.

Confucianism is all about tempering your instincts with intellectual discipline, with book learning.

While I think storytelling is a meaningful way to spend your life... it does feel a little bit secondary or off-point.

What is needed [to combat terrorism], in my view, is resolve, not retreat; courage, not concession. Rather than thinking in terms of an exit strategy, focus on a strategy for success.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning; the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject.

Government cannot do everything, so we need to first decide what government ought to be doing, then figure out what it's capable of doing, and then follow the jobs we choose to completion.

Them as ha' never had a cushion don't miss it.

I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race.

Too often we elevate the inconsequential into the influential... by reacting without reflecting.

For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.