The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.

A world technology means either a world government or world suicide.

Somehow life doesn't always pay off to those who are most insistent.

You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.

A politician wouldn't dream of being allowed to call a columnist the things a columnist is allowed to call a politician.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

The politics of surprise leads through the Gates of Astonishment into the Kingdom of Hope.

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.

When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.

To deaden yourself against any hurt is to deaden yourself also against the hurt of others.

A President is best judged by the enemies he makes when he has really hit his stride.

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.

Either men will learn to live like brothers or they will die like beasts.

Despite the success cult men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there or failing to get there.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

The tender heart, the broken and contrite spirit, are to me far above all the joys that I could ever hope for in this vale of tears.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

Infuse your life with action. Don't wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen... yourself, right now, right down here on Earth.

Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way.

I don't sit in the corner waiting for death: death has to pursue me. I'm going strong. I hope to reach 100 and ask for an extension, just like my grandmother did.

When I talk to people in need, they tell me they want to hope; they are eager for opportunity; they are ready for better days. And I can tell you that every time their hopes are disappointed, all nations lose.

I'd hope to reach any kid who feels apart from the group - those who seem to be outsiders, who feel different. Kids who want to reach their parents often don't know how to do so.

If we can just take a few companies, and use those as models, as examples, to show the rest of corporate America how they can become more competitive, that's what I'd like to do and that's what I hope to do.

It's part of the calling to at least do a few songs in the show that give people some hope. There's so much hurt in this world and... music is such a great healing balm and a great way to forget your troubles.

Just as a mother finds pleasure in taking her little child on her lap, there to feed and caress him, in like manner our loving God shows His fondness for His beloved souls who have given themselves entirely to Him and have placed all their hope in His goodness.

Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There's so little hope for advancement.

Testimony is an integral part of the Black religious tradition. It is the occasion where the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her.

What can you say about such a man as Christopher Reeve? He embodied all the best that a human being can hope to be.

Hope springs eternal, even in politics.

When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.

Having a sense of purpose is having a sense of self. A course to plot is a destination to hope for.

We are laying the foundations of a government, which we hope may outlast the Pyramids.