Art and Religion are then two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

I found enormous opposition to my religion. It's like if you want to strengthen your biceps you lift heavy weight as heavy as you can handle and work your muscles against resistance until it grows strong. I had to do that with my religion.

Well right now I'm very fascinated with 1920s Berlin. I mean probably the more interesting thing would be to go to the beginning of civilization or precivilization - like polytheistic times. It would be interesting to see what came before modern religion and culture - what circumstances created the environment or the need for it.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

There are tens of thousands of interactions every single day across Afghanistan between the Afghan troops and International Security Assistance Force. On most of those every single day we continue to deepen and broaden the relationship we seek.

Every relationship I've been in becomes long-distance because of work. It's never worked out. It puts an intense strain on the relationship and at a certain point it becomes too difficult.

Obviously a long-distance relationship is hard. But like anything worth having you make it work.

Life is suffering. Life is not resistance to suffering. The point of life is to suffer. This is why we're here: We're here to suffer. I believe in a higher power that compassionately allows suffering for us as a race to grow and mature.

Concentration of executive power unless it's very temporary and for specific circumstances let's say fighting world war two it's an assault on democracy.

The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.

All human laws are properly speaking only declaratory they have no power over the substance of original justice.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance pain torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

Circumstances are beyond human control but our conduct is in our own power.

Instead of yelling and spanking which don't work anyway I believe in finding creative ways to keep their attention - turning things into a game for instance. And when they do something good positive reinforcement and praise.

My stance has always been that there's no place in our sport for drug users. I've always said it's a ban for life if you come up positive. I stand by that.

You shall always find what you created in your mind for instance a benevolent God or an evil Devil. Between them are countless facets. Therefore concentrate on the depth of your consciousness and on what you consider to be positive and good.

Yes you need substance in politics - but I think your style also says something about how you arrive at some of your conclusions.

In politics a capable ruler must be guided by circumstances conjectures and conjunctions.

I've rarely kept my distance from kind of - I don't know if we can call it politics but kind of civic engagement and that kind of thing except I tended to think 'Well do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.'

A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives a politics that does not speak to and include people is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms so thinking about distance thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

If it is an imperfect word no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.