We may differ on many things, but what we respect is freeinquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement betweenProfessor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,concerning punctuated evolution and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shallresolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.

Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

Henry Louis Gates

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

John Milton

There is a crack in everything God has made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.

Frederick Buechner

The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it The Territory is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little timely pruning.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Happiness? No, it's not there for me.

Robert Mapplethorpe

When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.

The Talmud

The person who in shaky times also wavers only increases the evil, but the person of firm decision fashions the universe.

Johann von Goethe

It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.

George Eliot

Entertainment isn't just based on the very structured syndrome of European popular music, and it's great that there are so many thousands of people who are of the same opinion.

Robert Plant

Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.

Clarice Lispector