Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.

Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.

What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

A sound-bite culture can't discuss science very well. Exactly what we're losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can't be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.