Palm Sunday Quotes

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

There is never a shortage anywhere of lawyers eager to attack the First Amendment, as though it were nothing more than a clause in a lease from a crooked slumlord.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.