Sam Quotes

I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.

Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?"

Each of us as poets, as decent suffering human beings, has to find a way to run our lives that is compassionate toward one another and toward our environment.

As a man believes, so he will act.

To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have lived in a different universe had I been in a different universe.

Words like 'God' and 'Allah' must go the way of 'Apollo' and 'Baal' or they will unmake our world.

It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.

If Jesus does come down out of the clouds like a superhero, Christianity will stand revealed as a science . That will be the science of Christianity.

Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.

Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Principle #2: Do not defend your property. Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape.

This is how you play tennis without the net

In my own case, the most inflammatory statements I have ever made are ones that I have written and remain willing to defend.

Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.

‎Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident

I think it [getting a gun] should be like getting a pilot's license. I think you should require training to get a license to have a gun.

The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.

Unreason is now ascendant in the United States—in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.

Any conception of human well-being you could plausibly have, the Taliban patently fails to maximize it.

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths.

It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas).

To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering.

The fact that one can lose one's sense of self in an ocean of tranquility does not mean that one's consciousness is immaterial or that it presided over the birth of the universe.

Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.

The Urban Literate Southern California Sub-Group of the Early Atomic Period has not yet produced a distinct body of folk music of its own.

If they can't repeat it, they didn't get it.

People don't want information; they want epiphanies.

It's hard to stay on purpose if we don't know what our purpose is.

One sign of an excellent speech? 'Can people repeat something they heard, word for word?'

There is nothing wrong with people that reasoning with them won't aggravate!

Books in your head help no one.

I had a will to win that come from being raised poor.

I always learn something from every actor I've ever worked with. I always pick something from them.

My kid is a year and a half old, and I just want to roll around on the floor with him for a little bit and have a normal relationship with my family.

I would be hard-pressed to look back at anything that I have done in my career and not say, "I would have done that a little different" because hindsight is 20/20.

In all seriousness, I'm flattered and humbled to have been asked to reprise my role as Luke in the 'Veronica Mars' movie.

Anytime you test for a TV show, you have that bit of squeamishness entering into it because they lock you in for a number years.

Anytime you do a job, especially one that's as intense and long as this one was, you have phantom work syndrome. I'm constantly feeling like I'm miked, so I'm careful of what I say all the time.

You reach a point in your career when the weeks turn into a month or more of the phone not ringing.

The cooking side is the easier way to be creative. On the policy side, it's harder to think of new approaches to problems.

I curse Microsoft at least once a day. I only curse Apple every other day. As I see it, that's a 100 percent improvement.

Iron is the final peal of a star’s natural life.

Mendeleev, unlike the squeamish Meyer, had balls enough to predict that new elements would be dug up. Look harder, you chemists and geologists, he seemed to taunt, and you’ll find them.

Art, in other words, betrays a sexy mental fitness.

I think it's increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.

We now realize that we're not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together.

The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate.

There is the extreme of hopelessness and the inevitability of doom, a deep despair that comes from the sense that our industrial, consuming society is jeopardizing the planet.

The deepest mystery comes not when we don't know somebody well, but when we do.