It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.

You might think the thinner version of yourself is going to be the most positive or confident but that's not how it is for me. When I'm over 200 pounds that's when I'm the most confident version of myself.

I mean I went to a church school when I was younger and imbibed a certain amount of religion then but it was really in university that I got interested in religion and politics at the same time. I don't think as if it were one moment of conversion but my spiritual journey really began then.

Politics is the diversion of trivial men who when they succeed at it become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal which we all want to surpass and some don't.

I think it's a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people you'll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.

You can't be suspicious of a tree or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre this type of story and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before.

I'm named after a horse. My mom's best friend had a horse named Brooke so my dad suggested 'Brooklyn' as a more formal version and it just stuck - and now I live in Brooklyn part-time so go figure.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

I don't know what my version of a relationship or marriage is yet because the typical model seems a little broken to me.

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.

I tell students 'If you are learning from YouTube I almost don't want to teach you because what you learn from YouTube it takes 10 times as long to unlearn.' They do an approximation of the centre of the note an approximation of the interpretation a cloned version.

I spend so much time with the brightest and most talented and well-rounded people. I've had the privilege of having long and very intellectual conversations with people and sometimes I just sit there and listen. It's like a better version of a class. Even though I'm not sitting at a desk and in school I'm still learning all the time.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.

Our democracy our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

The sensitivity of men to small matters and their indifference to great ones indicates a strange inversion.

I'm against big bureaucracy in Washington making health care decisions. I just have an aversion to bureaucrats. But it's not just government bureaucrats. I don't like HMO bureaucrats and insurance company bureaucrats either.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases while the citizens may act only by permission which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history the stage of rule by brute force.