Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.

In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power, and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent.

Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.

I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.

The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.

Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.

There is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation.

To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.

Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love. We can never really love anybody with whom we never laugh. Love is in the giver, not the gift.

Chaos is the law of nature, order is the dream of man...

If you have a sharp brain, then you are an artist.

It's my job to find the cornel of truth and then exaggerate, exaggerate, exaggerate until it's of an appropriate scale.

I would say most comedians have a very cynical worldview of the way the world can work. It's almost like if you didn't, you couldn't be a comedian.

Of course people don't want war. Why should a poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best thing he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?

If no one thinks you can, then you have to.

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.

Playing the sax and then enjoying jazz music man. It's like I learned how to find words inside of the beat.

So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.

I had my eyes closed in the dark, I sighed a million sighs, I told a million lies, to myself, to myself.