You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next.

Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.

When life hands us a beutiful bouquet of flowers we stare at it in cautious expectation of a bee.

To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.

And the funny thing was if you made the best of it, if you smiled through every storm, the bad things were never as terrible as you expected them to be, and the good things were better than anything you could have wished for yourself.

Where there is cake, there is hope. And there is always cake.

As individuals, as families, as neighbors, as members of one community, people of all races and political views are usually decent, kind, compassionate. But in large corporations or governments, when great power accumulates in their hands, some become monsters even with good intentions.