It is through the acceptance of a variety of aethetic and intellectual points of view that a culture is given breadth and density.

The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.

I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

...in a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.

If you say merit does not matter but miracles or favor matters, you are equally destroying yourself and nation.

Missing from the national conversation are voices of pro-immigration reformers and civil rights leaders, who can speak on behalf of those who have no voice.

That woman." Vee hissed, "I'm making the sign of the cross right now.

I often find it easier to be teaching or giving to others, and often struggle with the place of my own pleasure and joy.

An autobiography should give the reader opportunity to point out the author's follies and misconceptions.

The superior man is intelligently, not blindly, faithful.

Things are going round and round in my head--or maybe my head is going round and round in things.

For senators to complain that they didn't know this was happening, we had many, many meetings that have been both classified and unclassified that members have been invited to.

You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection.

If we are immortal it is a fact in nature, and we are not indebted to priests for it, nor to bibles for it, and it cannot be destroyed by unbelief.