Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

If you are not planning for success, then you are planning for failure.

I'm supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing.

You know, funny is this weird word for me. I hear is so many times it has no meaning anymore.

The eleventh commandment: Thou shalt be tolerant of all paths that lead to God.

You have to move really fast, as a director in television. If you're able to keep things moving on set, everybody has more fun, and when everybody has more fun, the end result is funnier.

My brother was always in bands and on the road when I was a kid and he was my inspiration. He never made it with a big band, in fact he never made a record. Here he is fifty-something years old.

If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.

No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.

Back then it was nothing like today. So you'd go to the bowling alley. We bowled and you could be in the back and you could make out, you know? And you know how hot it was to make out.