Man depends on God for all things: God depends on man for one. Without man's love God does not exist as God, only as creator, and love is the one thing no one, not even God himself, can command. It is a free gift or it is nothing. And it is most itself, most free, when it is offered in spite of suffering, of injustice, and of death . . . The justification of the injustice of the universe is not our blind acceptance of God's inexplicable will, nor our trust in God's love, his dark and incomprehensible love, for us, but our human love, notwithstanding anything, for him.

Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.

Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.

What once was cuddled must learn to kiss The cold wonn's mouth. That's all the mystery.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.