To reject the word is to reject the human search.

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.

I never understood a word John Cassavetes said. And I think he did that deliberately.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

I don't know of many evangelicals who want to deny gay couples their legal rights. However, most of us don't want to call it marriage, because we think that word has religious connotations, and we're not ready to see it used in ways that offend us.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

In a word, if any kind of slavery can be vindicated by the Holy Scriptures, we are already sure our making and holding the Negroes our slaves, as we do, cannot be vindicated by any thing we can find there, but is condemned by the whole of divine revelation.

It is a common temptation of Satan to make us give up the reading of the Word and prayer when our enjoyment is gone; as if it were of no use to read the Scriptures when we do not enjoy them, and as if it were no use to pray when we have no spirit of prayer.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

These things don't just come, arrive and settle like a bird picking up a few bits of crumbs. They develop. I think the best word for these things is develop. They develop because of the human beings who just happen to be there at the time.

The word 'romance,' according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

Obedience to the word in humility of mind never confuses.

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.

I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Often we can help each other most by leaving each other alone; at other times we need the hand-grasp and the word of cheer.

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.

Sometimes songwriters and singers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody. It doesn't ring true.