True happiness arises in the first place from the enjoyment of one's self and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.

Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.

Believe me the drug of freedom is universally potent.

Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage or strike it from your banners and substitute 'Freedom and Power to one half of society and Submission and Slavery to the other.'

I believe our flag is more than just cloth and ink. It is a universally recognized symbol that stands for liberty and freedom. It is the history of our nation and it's marked by the blood of those who died defending it.

Bush is morally a universalist. For instance he says the freedom is good the same thing is good all over the world. So in that sense he's a universalist.

Where globalization means as it so often does that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

If you go out to dinner with someone you find out what they prefer in food. We ought to be able to have a conversation to find out what people prefer when it comes to sex.

When I'm writing my neural pathways get blocked. I can't read. I can barely hold a conversation without forgetting words and names. I wish I could wear the same clothes and eat the same food each day.

Food was a constant topic of conversation in our household.

Wit is the salt of conversation not the food.

If you are ever at a loss to support a flagging conversation introduce the subject of eating.

Eating without conversation is only stoking.

The goodness of a thing created is the perfection of its fitness for the use which it serves. Now that use is either particular or universal.

My adversary is the world of finance.

My real adversary has no name no face no party. It will never be elected yet it governs - the adversary is the world of finance.

The universal human laws - need love for the beloved fear hunger periodic exaltation the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant predictable reliable universal and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

So here we are today with a new conversation. When University of Georgia plays Georgia Tech it's uniform color versus skin color. We have - we've overcome that level of racial fear.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

The hardest thing about being famous is that people are always nice to you. You're in a conversation and everybody's agreeing with what you're saying - even if you say something totally crazy. You need people who can tell you what you don't want to hear.

The importance of human life should be universally respected - and that refers to children before they are born and after. All children have the right to be brought up in a loving two-parent family where the notion of divorce is not even possible.

We need a better way to talk about eating animals a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits cravings family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in the more able we will be to follow our best instincts.

The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better.

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers and I grew up in a very funny conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.