Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them.

Virtue that wavers is not virtue.

John Milton

It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed ... The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.

Abigail Adams, letter to her son

God is the supreme uncreated light of which Wisdom is born, but there was never a time when God's Wisdom did not exist.

Merritt Y. Hughes

Soft data, hard conflicts.

Gerhard Kocher

We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.

Miguel de Unamuno

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have known many who could not when they would, for they had not done it when they could.

Francois Rabelais

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

Corita Kent

Motherhood has completely changed me. It's just about like the most completely humbling experience that I've ever had. I think that it puts you in your place because it really forces you to address the issues that you claim to believe in and if you can't stand up to those principles when you're raising a child, forget it.

Diane Keaton

What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.

Boris Pasternak

We praise Him, we bless Him, we adore Him, we glorify Him, and we wonder who is that baritone across the aisle and that pretty woman on our right who smells of apple blossoms. Our bowels stir and our cod itches and we amend our prayers for the spiritual life with the hope that it will not be too spiritual.

John Cheever

If you look back in history of the women who are most memorable and most stylish, they were never the followers of fashion. They were the ones who were unique in their style, breakers of the rules. They were authentic, genuine, original. They were not following the trends.

Nina Garcia