Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.

If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.

It is ill to offer God one duty stained with the blood of another.

Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority.

Liberals are more upset when a tree is chopped down than when a child is aborted.

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.

What you don't want to know about yourself wants to be known, which is why it keeps 'showing up' at your door unannounced!

It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed - who cannot speak for themselves.

Act the way you'd like to be and soon you'll be the way you act.

I can't think of a single area where [Barack] Obama is not destructive.

the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.