If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up. |

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors. |

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure. |

Love, like fire, goes out without fuel. |

He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace. |

I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn. |

Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make. |

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. |

Those without substance suffer no wounds. |

Remember, all the answers you need are inside of you; you only have to become quiet enough to hear them. |

Do not wait: the time will never be 'just right'. Start where you stand, and work whatever tools you may have at your command and better tools will be found as you go along. |

Fundamentally you cannot be somebody else. You can only be less of who you are. |

The law is an opinion with a gun. |

There is nothing that is going to make people hate you more, and love you more, than telling the truth. |

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send. |

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. |

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. |

SAID A BLADE OF GRASS

Said a blade of grass to an autumn leaf, “You make such a noise falling! You scatter all my winter dreams.”

Said the leaf indignant, “Low-born and low-dwelling! Songless, peevish thing! You live not in the upper air and you cannot tell the sound of singing.”

Then the autumn leaf lay down upon the earth and slept. And when spring came she waked again — and she was a blade of grass.

And when it was autumn and her winter sleep was upon her, and above her through all the air the leaves were falling, she muttered to herself, “O these autumn leaves! They make such noise! They scatter all my winter dreams." |

Art is a disorder, to diss order. |

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are. |

To hold a pen is to be at war. |

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one. |

A witty saying proves nothing. |

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe. |