To make everything yield to custom would be to do the greatest injusti — John Calvin

"Where many of you only have an understanding of the eyes. What you see is division and separation, it is indeed troubling that God would share his power with Lucifer and allow him to fight against him, and bring about discontent. You will say that Lucifer must have a vehement disposition and ungovernable impetuosity; as if that was enough to break the power of God. Now with this understanding it is impossible to accept Lucifer as independent from God without falling into the Paganism of Persia and Indiana. This paganism has infiltrated the hearts of Christians and has caused them to forget the power of God, saying he does not have control over all. Now from this we can conclude that Lucifer, who you incorrectly call a Devil, is a loyal servant of God."

"In short, knowing that whatever may happen is ordained by the Lord, he will receive it with a peaceful and thankful heart, that he may not be guilty of proudly resisting the rule of him to whom he has once committed himself and all his belongings."

"First of all, Scripture draws our attention to this, that if we want ease and tranquility in our lives, we should resign ourselves and all that we have to the will of God, and at the same time we should surrender our affections to him as our Conqueror and Overlord."

"Primo meretur eorum perdita obstinatio et indomabilis, ut immensa miseriarum congerie sine fine et modo oppressi omnes exhilarent suis malis, nemo autem eorum misereatur. (Their [the Jews] depraved and indomitable obstinacy merits that none of them be pitied, as they all delight in their evils while being oppressed by a great mass of miseries without end or measure.)"

"Where there is so much division and separation as we now see, it is indeed no easy matter to still the troubled waters, and bring about composure. You will say he has a vehement disposition and ungovernable impetuosity; as if that very vehemence did not break forth with all the greater violence when all show themselves alike indulgent to him, and allow him to have his way unquestioned. If this specimen of overbearing tyranny has sprung forth already, as the early blossom in the springtide of a reviving Church, what must we expect in a short time, when affairs have fallen into a far worse condition?"

"Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God. Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other."

"If it fulfills our hopes, this center will be, at once, a symbol and a reflection and a hope. It will symbolize our belief that the world of creation and thought are at the core of all civilization. Only recently in the White House we helped commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare. The political conflicts and ambitions of his England are known to the scholar and to the specialist. But his plays will forever move men in every corner of the world. The leaders that he wrote about live far more vividly in his words than in the almost forgotten facts of their own rule. Our civilization, too, will largely survive in the works of our creation. There is a quality in art which speaks across the gulf dividing man from man and nation from nation, and century from century. That quality confirms the faith that our common hopes may be more enduring than our conflicting hostilities. Even now men of affairs are struggling to catch up with the insights of great art. The stakes may well be the survival of civilization. The personal preferences of men in government are not important--except to themselves. However, it is important to know that the opportunity we give to the arts is a measure of the quality of our civilization. It is important to be aware that artistic activity can enrich the life of our people, which really is the central object of Government. It is important that our material prosperity liberate and not confine the creative spirit."

"The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might — hope against hope — have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other area of human knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even "revolutionary" shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be "refuted" by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus."

"An authorship that began with Either/Or and advanced step by step seeks here its decisive place of rest, at the foot of the altar, where the author, personally most aware of his own imperfections and guilt, certainly does not call himself a truth-witness but only a singular kind of poet and thinker who, without authority, has had nothing new to bring but “has wanted once again to read through, if possible in a more inward way, the original text handed down from the fathers” Preface P. 165"

"If the proverbial man of the planet Mars would come to this earth and inquire about the difference between "leader" and "ruler" he would learn that "rulers" are strange people who dressed in ermine, wore crowns, married foreign women, kept strictly to themselves, and had the inclination to administer the country without asking the people about their wishes. A "leader," on the other hand, he would be told, is a regular fellow in a simple uniform who embodies his nation, who tries desperately to create by propaganda complete unison between his ideas and the people. A leader, he might hear, was a local boy who made good, who spoke everybodys language, who never traveled abroad and disliked titles and royal paraphernalia."

"I went into my own black-out period [1942-45] which lasted two or three years where the canvases would simply build up until they’d get like stone and it was always just a gray mess. The image wouldn’t emerge, but I worked pretty regularly. I was fighting to find I knew not what, but I could no longer stay with what I had."

"Now, six years ago, al-Qaeda was planning to attack the Twin Towers. It wasnt a very nice world. And I think that if you think about six years ago, al-Qaida was preparing to attack the Twin Towers, Pakistan was allied with the Taliban, Afghanistan was the base from which al-Qaida was going to operate; the Israelis and the Palestinians had given up on a chance for -- or let me put it, the Palestinians had walked away from a chance for a Palestinian state, launched the second intifada, elected Ariel Sharon who basically said there would never be a Palestinian state and there will be a greater Israel; the North Korean were cheating on a deal that they had just signed; China and others were indifferent to that because it was a U.S.-North Korea bilateral deal; Iran was cheating on the IAEA out of sight. I could go on and on and on. That was the world in 2000 and 2001. And there is no doubt that by confronting -- oh, by the way, and Saddam Hussein was shooting at our pilots regularly in the no-fly zone and making a mockery of the Oil-for-Peace -- Oil-for-Food program and corruption was running rampant in that program. So, a worse world? I think so."