There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it but you can't prove that there aren't any so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people with respect to our political interests than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

The little religion that I have clung to-that what matters most is the continuity of life and its improvement from one generation to another.

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people and mention how important it is that compassion is the key that it's the sine-qua-non of religion people look kind of balked and stubborn sometimes as much to say what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?

Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

I met Roy's father once... And I think that Roy's relationship with his father is still at the heart of what Roy does. But at the end of the day he's trying to prove himself to a father he'll never really please.

I have never lied about my relationship with Bill Clinton. The only proven liar at this point and the only admitted liar is Bill Clinton not Gennifer Flowers not Kathleen Willey not Paula Jones and not Monica Lewinsky at this point. He is the only proven liar.

So China will be having to make some choices as to whose side it wants to be on. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a major improvement in our relationship with them if they choose correctly.

I can sort of do what I want. Maybe I have to work harder to prove myself in some new relationship because they've heard some wacky stories about me. But at least I can get the meeting.

From reading over the notes for each session it was apparent that there had been improvement by more or less regular steps from almost complete terror at sight of the rabbit to a completely positive response with no signs of disturbance.

I think I'm the most positive guy still going in my generation and I'm out there to prove that.

The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.

It is true that you can't prove a negative. However the existence of God is provable in the same way a building is positive proof that there was a builder.

American influence in the world is certainly considerable but the United States does not control directly or indirectly the politics and economics of other societies as empires have always done save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

Abortion politics have distracted all sides from what is really essential: a major aid campaign to improve midwifery prenatal care and emergency obstetric services in poor countries.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die be reborn die again but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message an advent of sense.

War is not the quintessential emergency in which man has to prove himself as my generation learned at its school desks in the days of the Kaiser rather peace is the emergency in which we all have to prove ourselves.

It is a grave matter to enter a war without adequate military preparation it may prove fatal to come into peace without moral and religious preparation.

Israel welcomes the wind of change and sees a window of opportunity. Democratic and science-based economies by nature desire peace. Israel does not want to be an island of affluence in an ocean of poverty. Improvements in our neighbours' lives mean improvements to the neighbourhood in which we live.