Prophecy today is hardly the romantic business that it used to be. The old tools of the trade, like the sword, the hair shirt, and the long fast in the wilderness, have given way to more contemporary, mundane instruments of doom --the book, the picket and the petition, the sit-in at City Hall.

The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

George Saunders

Under the summer roses When the flagrant crimson Lurks in the dusk Of the wild red leaves, Love, with little hands, Comes and touches you With a thousand memories, And asks you Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Carl Sandburg

If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.

Mahatma Gandhi

The secret to understanding me is, I'm not trying to be anybody other than who I actually am. People want candid, refreshing leadership. And I've always tried to go with solutions. You know, I've always tried to say, here's how we get our economy growing, here's why we get our debt under control. That's what Mitt Romney is offering.

Paul Ryan

To be a member of the Labor Party is to be an optimist - optimistic about the future of Australia, optimistic about the ability of government to make a difference.

Kevin Rudd

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

Anne Lamott

If you're not comfortable enough with yourself or with your own truth when entering a relationship, then you're not ready for that relationship.

Steve Maraboli

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased.

Kehlog Albran

Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.

Herman Hesse

Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?

Emma Goldman

I think the worst and most insidious procrastination for me is research. I will be looking for some bit of fact or figure to include in the novel, and before I know, I've wasted an entire morning delving into that subject matter without a word written.

James Rollins

We can offer up much in the large, but to make sacrifices in little things is what we are seldom equal to.

Johann von Goethe