One doesn't have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

Where there is forgiveness, there is always love.

When I die my epitaph should read: She Paid the Bills.

Death is the tyrant of the imagination.

People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.

We reaffirm that on days like this, there are no Republicans or Democrats. We are Americans, united in concern for our fellow citizens.

But I, for one, am not interested in a harmless truth or a harmless God. Give me a truth that works, and a God who makes me tremble.

It's not just buying the company. Sure, we picked the right companies, and we picked the right management and, most importantly, we've given them the right incentive to perform.

I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair.[Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

Suretyship (Dogma) is the precursor of ruin.