The coward calls himself cautious, the miser thrifty.

The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking power. This means to foster democratic freedom.

The manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured.

Every one can master a grief but he that has it. -Much Ado about Nothing. Act iii. Sc. 2.

Feast of Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, Teacher, 1153 Commemoration of William & Catherine Booth, Founders of the Salvation Army, 1912 & 1890 Bernard [of Clairvaux] did not stop with love for God or Christ, he insisted also that the Christian must love his neighbors, including even his enemies. Not necessarily that he must feel affection for them -- that is not always possible in this life, though it will be in heaven -- but that he must treat them as love dictates, doing always for others what he would that they should do for him. ... A. C. McGiffert, A History of Christian Thought August 21, 2000 At the very moment when the pulpit has fallen strangely silent about sin, fiction can talk of little except evil, not indeed viewed as sin, but apparently as the invariable ways of a peculiarly repulsive insect, which it can't help, poor thing; and there is no manner of use expecting anything from it, except the nastiness natural to it.

The Senate is a place filled with goodwill and good intentions, and if the road to hell is paved with them, then it's a pretty good detour.

The self-centered regret which a man feels when his sin has found him out -- the wish, compounded of pride, shame, and anger at his own inconceivable folly, that he had not done it: these are spoken of as repentance. But they are not repentance at all... It is the simple truth that that sorrow of heart, that healing and sanctifying pain in which sin is really put away, is not ours in independence of God; it is a saving grace which is begotten in the soul under the impression of sin it owes to the revelation of God in Christ. A man can no more repent than he can do anything else without a motive; and the motive which makes evangelic repentance possible does not enter into his world till he sees God as God makes Himself known in the death of Christ. All true penitents are children of the Cross. Their penitence is not their own creation: it is the reaction towards God produced in their souls by this demonstration of what sin is to Him, and of what His love does to reach and win the sinful.

I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove; I will roar you, an 't were any nightingale. -A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act i. Sc. 2.

Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

Words have ruined more souls than any devil's agency.

Those who are at war with others are seldom at peace with themselves.

Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.

'Tis solitude should teach us how to die; It hath no flatterers; vanity can give No hollow aid; alone--man with his God must strive.

The prudence of the best heads is often defeated by the tenderness of the best of hearts.

Always forgive your enemies--nothing annoys them so much.

You can learn little from victory. You can learn everything from defeat.

Today, if you are not confused, you are just not thinking clearly.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few; and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.

Either I will find a way, or I will make one.