Yet, if the most frequent sex and apparently the best sex is that between married partners who are faithful to one another, is there not a hint that affection might be an important aspect of sex? Even love?

You're a Catholic in Italy when you're born, it's unthinkable to stop being Catholic. You just take the rules a lot more seriously, because it pervades your culture.

Priest organizations around the country, both local and national, should realize that their membership has a serious image problem and undertake programs to improve it.

It is also asserted that the election settled the matters of the war and the torture of prisoners. These are dead issues that no longer need be addressed.

I think that the core doctrines of Christianity - the incarnation, the resurrection, life after death-these are as strong as ever. In fact, the belief in life after death has increased in this century.

Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.

Nobody puts constraints on God. She doesn't like it.

Would it not be much better to have a president who deliberately lied to the people because he thought a war was essential than to have one who was so dumb as to be taken in by intelligence agencies, especially those who told him what he wanted to hear?

If we get you in the early years of your life and we fill your head with all of the Catholic stories, then it's very hard for you to stop being Catholic. Catholics are Catholics because they like being Catholic.

One cannot escape the harsh fact that as a ministerial profession, the priesthood has very serious problems. They are not new. They did not develop yesterday or last year.

Practically speaking, your religion is the story you tell about your life.

Two studies from the year 2000, however, indicate that Catholics give lower ratings to their clergy's ministerial activities across the board than do Protestants.

In God, the characteristics of men and women that we admire in men and women are combined. That's been a traditional Catholic teaching that God is the combination of opposites.

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.

I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad.

I think the only kind of acceptable evangelization is the evangelization of good example.

Note the three most important Cabinet positions. Rice said that it was better to find the weapons of mass destruction than to see a mushroom cloud.

I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion.

I have to say that I have no regrets about my decision to become a priest or about the major directions my ministry has taken me... I have been and am happy as a priest, and I have never been lonely... I could have used a bit more solitude.

Is the patience of the American people that long suffering? Is there no outrage left in the country?

There is good news in the data the strongest support for priests is to be found among the younger generation.

The leadership lost its nerve. Instead of taking the lead in the reform movement... they pulled the plug on it. They tried and are still trying to return the church to the dry ice of the previous century and a half.

The Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.

It was generally believed that Catholics were not interested in arts and science graduate schools. They weren't going to be intellectuals. And so I put the theses to the test. And they all collapsed.

As the criminal, sinful war in Iraq enters its third year, the president goes to Europe to heal the wounds between the United States and its former allies, on his own terms of course.

I wouldn't say the world is my parish, but my readers are my parish. And especially the readers that write to me. They're my parish. And it's a responsibility that I enjoy.

Well, religion has been passed down through the years by stories people tell around the campfire. Stories about God, stories about love. Stories about good spirits and evil spirits.

Yet, if the most frequent sex and apparently the best sex is that between married partners who are faithful to one another, is there not a hint that affection might be an important aspect of sex? Even love?

There has always been a certain proportion of people who leave the Church on issues of authority and sex. That hasn't changed since we started doing research on it back in the early 1960s.

I don't think Jesus was an exclusivist. He said, and we believe, that He is the unique representation of God in the world. But that doesn't mean this is the only way God can work.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us.

The essential elements of giving are power and love - activity and affection - and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other.

The great model of the affection of love in human beings is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children.

No money on earth can buy the love and affection that has been given to me by a grateful nation.

I have loved but one flag and I can not share that devotion and give affection to the mongrel banner invented for the League of Nations.

Affection reproaches, but does not denounce.

But today, I feel the genuine warmth, the affection, and although I may joke about it, I am touched.

Well the wedding in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury was a fairy tale and there was a huge public impress, investment of goodwill, affection and indeed money in this Institution. It was a huge success at the time.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

The public has always had affection for gay entertainers. The time was right for an out gay entertainer.

While I've lived in L.A. since 1985, I'll always consider Chicago my home town and have much affection for it. My parents and sister still live there so I try to visit as often as I'm able.

A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection.

I would tell anyone who wants something from someone else to feign not wanting it. People are perverse. If you show great affection to them, they'll run the other way.

I think the President inspires tremendous affection and loyalty by a wide range of people.

He makes a great mistake... who supposes that authority is firmer or better established when it is founded by force than that which is welded by affection.

Even Stravinsky does not evoke the same public affection as Verdi.

Unless our conception of patriotism is progressive, it cannot hope to embody the real affection and the real interest of the nation.

Talk not of wasted affection - affection never was wasted.