Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance--a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late--and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that knowledge, we are ever able to recover. When we again find our way despite the inability to manufacture a deeper meaning in our suffering, that I think is when God smiles upon us, proud of the strength of his creation.

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come.

Victor Hugo

The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

Ursula K. Le Guin

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

William Butler Yeats

If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved.

Russell Lynes

My older brother Mike is an excellent trumpet player. By the time he was 12, he was playing around Kansas City in classical situations. He was already an amazing talent.

Pat Metheny

Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!

Christopher Hitchens

The only way people are going to change their car buying habits, and the only way government will get behind alternatively fueled vehicles, is if gasoline prices continue to go up.

Alexandra Paul

It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experiences of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity.

Charles Horton Cooley

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster a highly ornamental pot. As people mature, they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's

Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.

Johann von Goethe

I am looking for suggestions on what we can do about extremists within our own society. They cannot be ignored.

Tony Campolo