In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists.

I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people including fundamentalists are quite intelligent many of them are highly educated and they should be treated with complete respect.

The fundamentalists are increasing. People afraid to oppose those fundamentalists shut their mouths. It is really very difficult to make people move against a sensitive issue like religion which is the source of fundamentalism.

I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion.

My relationship with the journalists who covered the campaign was complicated. I often hid from the critical eye of their cameras and their omnipresent digital recorders wary of the critique implicit in every captured moment. But I also grew to respect and understand their passion for their work their love for the journey we were sharing.

Sometimes negative news does come out but it is often exaggerated and manipulated to spread scandal. Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia: which is a sin that taints all men and women that is the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.

Political consultants are pugilists masters in the dark art of negativity. Which is why it's surprising to hear Democrats such as Steve McMahon and Republicans like Rich Galen urging their presidential candidates to be more well positive.

The larger meaning here is that mainstream journalists simply cannot talk about things that the two parties agree on this is the black hole of American politics.

There's a nastiness out there that wants to harm me with words. These are my enemies - the ideologues the populists the columnists who don't like the fact that I take them on toe-to-toe. What I try to do is tell the truth. It's not the coin of the realm in politics.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science along with behaviour control genetic engineering transplanted heads computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

Environmentalists hate sprawl - except when it comes to the size of their expansive pet legislation on Capitol Hill.

On movies you have a lot of stylists that get things too pretty. Everything gets steamed and ironed. It's just not the way we really behave.

Sometimes I lose a whole morning waiting on journalists and other people who look for me. But I always find some time for reading talking to my friends and feeling what is happening in this world.

Capitalism is using its money we socialists throw it away.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

The foundation of our religion is a basis of fact - the fact of the birth ministry miracles death resurrection by the Evangelists as having actually occurred within their own personal knowledge.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting they're dressing the scene they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

I think journalists have the right to their opinions but I think their opinions should be based on history and what they see not what they feel how long they've been waiting or whether it's raining or it's snowing or whatever.

The history of the last century shows as we shall see later that the advice given to governments by bankers like the advice they gave to industrialists was consistently good for bankers but was often disastrous for governments businessmen and the people generally.

Journalists should denounce government by public opinion polls.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest their holding too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government and there's no need soft peddling it it's the truth. It is the truth.

Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature as if we're some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It's a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy. Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well but that it has limits.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.