No more than a surgeon can operate while tweeting can you reach your potential with one ear in, one ear out. You actually have to reacquaint yourself with concentration. We all do.

Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.

What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.

Success is not about who never fails. It is about who can spring - or even stagger - back up.

Violence against women isn't cultural, it's criminal. Equality cannot come eventually, it's something we must fight for now.

Without investing in the rule of law for the poor, none of the other investments we make will be sustainable.

It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.

My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.

Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.

I like to think that as I get older I'm getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with.

Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.

The classics tell us that, in relationships, the one between teacher and student comes second only to the one between parent and child.

You gotta fish or cut bait, man.This has gone on long enough. You're playing with fire, every damn time you walk in this bar.

It takes a while for revelry to turn to reverence, and much repetition of truth to eventual turn young zeal into habitual channels for good.

Progress' affects few. Only revolution can affect many.

Don't judge me. You know my name, but not my story.

Alas! it is true: "Be polite to bores and so shall you have bores always round about you."

I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.

Demonreach only wants Harry to see what's going on." "Why doesn't it just marry him?" Thomas muttered under his breath. "It sort of did," I said. "My brother the... geosexual?

Casting is a long process for me. I take a lot of time.

In contemplative prayer we seek to become the person we are called to be, not by thinking of God, but by being with God. Simply to be with God is to be drawn into being the person God calls us to be