People who live under fascism are not only miserable but they're full of shame. You just don't go in and inject democracy into them. They're half crazy with their own.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

Until you have suffered much in your heart, you cannot learn humility.

You do not need many possessions to have a happy life.

You know it's love when all you want is that person to be happy even if you're not part of their happiness.

If God calls you to be a minister, don't stoop to becoming a king.

It's not about being right, it's about getting it right.

If a vacuum cleaner salesman rings your front door, he will be selling HIMSELF first. The vacuum cleaner is secondary.

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

But I am a-eppisodin' and a-eppisodin' to a length and depth almost onprecedented and onheard of - and to resoom and go on.

As I get older, it's a time to enjoy life.

The book says we may be through with the past but the past ain't through with us.