Confronted by menace or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, and drefine it.

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.

Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.

House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.

The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke

He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.

Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.

Repentance is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose; it is simply a description of what going back is like.

When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems.

I have lived: tomorrow the Father may fill the sky with black clouds or with cloudless sunshine.

Everyone at some point in their lives feels excluded and misunderstood.

I just wrapped 'Eclipse' yesterday and the last scene we shot is probably my favorite thus far. I finally got to tell my story, in a very gentle yet elaborate way.

When the war started, religion and superstition (whatever the difference is) permeated the lives of ordinary soldiers, who lived in a thought world not too far removed from the seventeenth century.

At least the fundamentalists haven't tried to dilute their message. Their faith is exposed for what it is for all to see.

News conferences are the only chance the American public has to see Ronald Reagan use his mind.

It is better to be making the news than taking it, to be an actor rather than a critic.