If you want creative and successful children, resign yourself to jousting with rebels.

It is not faith per se that creates the problem; it is conviction, the notion that one cannot be wrong, that opposing views are necessarily invalid and may even be intolerable.

The uplifters are forever running around telling blockheads they would do better if they would believe in themselves. But they already do. That is why they are blockheads.

The measure of a civilization is in the courage, not of its soldiers, but of its bystanders.

... the truth is that when your people don't tell you what you need to know, it's a failure of leadership.

We could never know who we truly were until we heard the whispers of the stars.

Boundaries have no existence save on charts or in small minds. Nature does not draw lines.

Man has always seen himself the peak of creation. The part of the universe that thinks. The purpose for it all. It's no doubt a gratifying view, but the universe may have a different opinion.

Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.

Universal deities ... never seem to smile. Not in any culture. What's the point of having omnipotence if you don't enjoy it?

The problem is that too often the only people who can act don't want change. Power doesn't so much corrupt as it breeds conservatism.

Like when people say they slept like a baby. Do they mean they slept well? Or do they mean they woke up every ten minutes, screaming?

He that dies pays all debts.

All rising to great places is by a winding stair.

Our point is we don't want to sit in the government and tell you what you have to buy [as a health insurance]. We want to make this work so that you have choices, so that we have more competition.

To take all that we are and have and hand it over to God may not be easy; but it can be done; and when it is done, the world has in it one less candidate for misery.

It's actually very difficult to make something both simple and good.

I'm quite an optimist, quite happy in life, quite smiley.

I've wanted one thing in my life. I don't want to be that girl that gets that one thing then complains.

Prevention of birth is premature murder, and it makes no difference whether it is a life already born that one snatches away or a life that is coming to birth.

I'm going to Queen Mary's [university] in East London and I am trying to juggle it. Sometimes, it's really hard.