If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata--of creatures that worked like machines--would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

When President Obama passed health care reform, it was personal! And when Governor Romney says he would repeal Obamacare and put insurance companies back in charge of a woman's health, that's personal too.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz

I love Italian food but that's too generic a term for what's available now: you have to narrow it down to Tuscan, Sicilian, and so on.

Lee Child

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

Stephen King

Every man has three characters -- that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.

Alphonse Karr

Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An incorrect model can be a useful tool.

Kelvin Throop III

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau

Rumors sound of galleries asking artists for upsized art and more of it. I've heard of photographers asked to print larger to increase the wall power and salability of their work. Everything winds up set to maximum in order to feed the beast.

Jerry Saltz

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Albert Camus

All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

Samuel Johnson

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Lionel Trilling

Peace should provide security. It should be durable. I'm ready to go far in making painful concessions. But there is one thing I will never make any concessions on and that's the security of the Israeli citizens and the very existence of the state of Israel. The Palestinians are losing time.

Ariel Sharon

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

Mahatma Gandhi