I think the Iraqi people have shown extraordinary patience and courage in the last few months. They have really put a political system on the way to success, to a real democracy here.

There is a kind of beauty in imperfection.

Conrad Hall

Of all that Orient lands can vaunt, of marvels with our own competing, the strangest is the Haschish plant, and what will follow on its eating.

John Greenleaf Whittier

God is the Unique, and he is so perfect that he does not resemble any of the things that exist or any of the things that do not; you cannot describe him using your human intelligence, as if he were someone who becomes angry if you are bad or worries about you out of goodness, someone who has a mouth, ears, face, wings, or that is spirit, father or son, not even of himself. Of the Unique you cannot say he is or is not, he embraces all but is nothing; you can name him only through dissimilarity, because it is futile to call him Goodness, Beauty, Wisdom, Amiability, Power, Justice, it would be like calling him Bear, Panther, Serpent, Dragon, or Gryphon, because whatever you say of him you will never express him. God is not body, is not figure, is not form; he does not see, does not hear, does not know disorder and perturbation; he is not soul, intelligence, imagination, opinion, thought, word, number, order, size; he is not equality and is not inequality, is not time and is not eternity; he is a will without purpose. Try to understand, Baudolino: God is a lamp without flame, a flame without fire, a fire without heat, a dark light, a silent rumble, a blind flash, a luminous soot, a ray of his own darkness, a circle that expands concentrating on its own center, a solitary simplicity; he is...is... She paused, seeking an example that would convince them both, she the teacher and he the pupil. He is a space that is not, in which you and I are the same thing, as we are today in this time that doesn't flow.

Umberto Eco, Baudolino

We've got to demonstrate why European unity and integration, our vast single market, our single currency, equip us with the strength to embrace globalization.

Peter Mandelson

You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.

Fran Lebowitz

And what's a life? - a weary pilgrimage, Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age

Francis Quarles

Clark, that's the gift that keeps on giving the whole year.

Cousin Eddie

All these books have lived together ... inside my mind. They follow one another only on paper and because of an utter impossibility to let themselves be all written at the same time. Whatever book I write, I never devote myself to it completely, and the matter which most insistently requires me soon later develops, however, at the other end of me.

Andre Gide, Journal, SeptemberOc

I regret not having had more time with my kids when they were growing up.

Tina Turner

Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through asexuality (without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs). Each of them split in half: Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).

Ray Comfort

I'm just a big homebody and love word games like Scrabble and Boggle.

Sung Hi Lee

Calm self-confidence is as far from conceit as the desire to earn a decent living is remote from greed.

Channing Pollock