I know what I like when I see it, but no way have I ever become interested in learning about it.

For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

Bell Hooks

Juga jangan jadi kriminil dalam percintaan-yang menaklukan wanita dengan gemerincing ringgit,kilau harta dan pangkat.Lelaki belakangan ini adalah juga kriminil,sedang perempuan yang tertaklukan hanya pelacur.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who

Christopher Hitchens

The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so.

Sam Harris

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone therefore we are saved by love.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen.

Larry Niven

The Gateway to Christianity is not through an intricate labyrinth of dogma, but by a simple belief in the person of Christ.

William Lyon Phelps

Grant me some wild expressions, Heavens, or I shall burst.

George Farquhar

Not all that have fallen are vanquished.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

George Bernard Shaw

We are none of us infallible -- not even the youngest of us.

William Hepworth Thompson

I've always been a guy who wants to play sports, not watch them.

Shaun White