But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.

You can't be neutral on a moving train.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.

I didn't want to spent a lot of close time with someone who believed that fun is a bourgeois indulgence.

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

You have a... remarkable memory.""I remember everything about you. You're the one who wasn't paying attention.

Our relationship with Jesus is based on grace- on the unexpected, undeserved, counterintuitive love of God.

If we believe in what God made and what God said, we will believe in the One whom God sent.

Without the love of a woman, it is impossible to have a manly world.

All things must change to something new to something strange.

The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.

Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.

I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.

A cat can be social, but a dog, we've bred this hyper social animal that's really truly different and will do stuff for us just to please us with praise and stroking.

I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right.