I have deep respect for people's individual faith, but when faith gets connected to the machinery of state, or the machinery of hate, I find it very confronting.

As I discovered, even the governor of a major state who holds pro-life views can be denied a hearing at his party's convention without the national media protesting it.

Robert Casey

The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.

Carl Sagan

I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.

Chuck Palahniuk

Our schools should get five years to get back to where they were in 1963. If they're still bad maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools

William John Bennett

A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.

JeanPaul Sartre, Upon refusing t

There are no uninteresting things, there are only uninterested people.

G. K. Chesterton

The sensual and spiritual are linked together by a mysterious bond, sensed by our emotions, though hidden from our eyes. To this double nature of the visible and invisible world -- to the profound longing for the latter, coupled with the feeling of the sweet necessity for the former, we owe all sound and logical systems of philosophy, truly based on the immutable principles of our nature, just as from the same source arise the most senseless enthusiasms.

Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

Thomas Jefferson

There would be far less suffering in the world if human beings-God knows why they are made like this-did not use their imaginations so busily in recalling the memories of past misfortunes, instead of trying to bear an indifferent present.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely-packed heathen are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Just because you're not famous, doesn't mean you're not good.

Laura Linney

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

Francis Bacon