What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

You will never win an unfair competition since the reward is meaningless.

Where are they, the American fiction writers whose works are interested in the question “What do these people have to do with us?” and “What are we doing out there in the world?

Even as I think them, the words lose their context, dissolve into grains of absurdity in the vast ocean of day-to-day hunger.

He immediately went down with a thud and I was pretty certain most of the furniture in the room jumped when he landed.

Prayer should be soundless words coming forth from the center of your heart filled with love.

Men are like trees: each one must put forth the leaf that is created in him.

Sooner or later a rider will emerge who will win more Tours. In every sport we have seen how the records eventually get broken and cycling is no exception.

I exhort and entreat you all, disregard what this man and that man thinks about these things, and inquire from the Scriptures all these things.

Time goes by so fast. Nothin' can outrun it. Death commences too early--almost before you're half-acquainted with life--you meet the other.

A nation that combines the America predilection towards violence, the American stockpile of weapons and the American lack of empathy for the earth's humiliated peoples is a dangerous nation.