It takes time to see the desert; you have to keep looking at it. When you've looked long neough, you realise the blank wastes of sand and rock are teemming with life. Just as you can keep looking at a person and suddenly realise that the way you see them has completely changed: from being a stranger, they've gradually revealed themselves as someone with a wealth of complexities and surprising subtleties that you're growing to love.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolutewhere no Catholic prelate would tell the President how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to votewhere no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preferenceand where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewishwhere no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical sourcewhere no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officialsand where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all. For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jewor a Quakeror a Unitarianor a Baptist. It was Virginias harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jeffersons statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victimbut tomorrow it may be youuntil the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril. Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday endwhere all men and all churches are treated as equalwhere every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choicewhere there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kindand where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood. That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

Albert Einstein

A wit should no more be sincere, than a woman constant; one argues a decay of parts, as to other of beauty.

William Congreve

The mind's direction is more important than its progress.

Joseph Joubert

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

Paulo Coelho

Let them call me a rebel and welcome. I feel no concern from it. But should I suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.

Thomas Paine

We live in an imperfect world, and imperfect people surround us every day.

Joyce Meyer

I actually don't feel famous.

Anwar Robinson

We're all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly.

John Hurt

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.

Hilton Kramer

I hope to die in the saddle seat.

Albert Ellis

In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.

J. William Fulbright