I respect people who feel things passionately. I do. But when someone is a judge that is not what they should bring to the bench. It is not really passion except in rare instances that serves the bench well. It is rather an ability to understand the law and follow it.

Psychology is as important as substance. If you treat people with respect they will go out of their way to accommodate you. If you treat them in a patronizing way they will go out of their way to make your life difficult.

I met Jesse Owens once. He was a remarkable individual and I have tremendous respect for what he did in the Olympics under the circumstances.

I for one respect those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which any abortion should ever be available.

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.

Our nation and those of the developed world must offer our own resistance to despot leaders who seek to commit murder on the basis of religion or race.

We are pre-disposed for fantasy there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.

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.