The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.

Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.

House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.

Confronted by menace or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, and drefine it.

He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.

Mind chatter: a clatter of left-brain rains of doubt, worry, guilt, shame in a thunderstorm of fear. Forgive the chatter, clear your mind.

I was once in darkness, but now, the light of God has shone upon me.

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.

The man who fears nothing is as powerful as he who is feared by everybody.

Here's what breaks us: Even though we know better, we still want everything to be all right.

I'm a very law-abiding citizen, and I've never consciously broken any law. I get nervous just jaywalking in Los Angeles!

Judge not thy friend until thou standest in his place.

Germany must be a country which generates political ideas and leadership, which is capable of compromise, which is sovereign and yet knows that it needs its partners on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lean forward into your life. Begin each day as if it were on purpose.

God's miracles are to be found in nature itself; the wind and waves, the wood that becomes a tree - all of these are explained biologically, but behind them is the hand of God.