But I remember the moment when my father died. I wasn't a very committed Catholic beforehand but when that happened it suddenly all felt so obvious: I now believe religion is our attempt to find an explanation for us to feel more protected.

Religion oh just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

Eradicating a religion of kindness is I think a terrible thing for the Chinese to attempt.

There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.

I think when you're trying to produce a relationship on screen that doesn't actually exist perhaps sometimes there's a temptation to look at each other more to touch each other more.

Religion is man's attempt to bind himself back to a relationship with God.

The whole of science and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here and how do you fit in and what's it all about.

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth as was demonstrated with Watergate we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious contemptuous even of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.

Militant feminists are pro-choice because it's their ultimate avenue of power over men. And believe me to them it is a question of power. It is their attempt to impose their will on the rest of society particularly on men.

Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity.

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

Never go backward. Attempt and do it with all your might. Determination is power.

President Obama has basically avoided or not done any attempt to intervene in any positive way in the housing market. I think in the financial crisis that's been a shame.

Broadcasters or politicians or writers who think that they are respecting Struggle Street the battlers by dumbing things down into one-line sound bites are not respecting them they are treating them with contempt. It's our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them.

In politics nothing is contemptible.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

Every goal every action every thought every feeling one experiences whether it be consciously or unconsciously known is an attempt to increase one's level of peace of mind.

I pity the young woman who will attempt to insinuate herself between my mama's boy and me. I sympathize with the monumental nature of her task. It will take a crowbar two bulldozers and half a dozen Molotov cocktails to pry my Oedipus and me loose from one another.

What I'm attempting to do is to show people that if I can spend some time with very dangerous spiders and snakes and scorpions then maybe they'll feel different about the spiders and snakes they find around their areas. I don't need people to keep them as pets. I just like them to be respectful and see that everything in nature has its place.

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature and it is to their ideas rather than to the temptations of utopia that we must ask that our judges adhere.

There will be I think an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself or for anything else.