Tibet, why is it occupied? For political reasons maybe they have a reason. I don't know. But religiously, why? The fact that the religious community is being oppressed and persecuted is something that every single person in the world who has any religious faith and religious feeling for - for people who have faith should speak up.

It is by his freedom that a man knows himself, by his sovereignty over his own life that a man measures himself.

[My approach to the Bible, history does really matter.] Everything matters. But I have priorities. For instance, for me to know whether there were two Isaiahs or one is less important than the text itself. Of course I read the arguments for and against. But it's not my task in life to say there were two or three authors of Isaiah's book, or how many authors there were of Deuteronomy. This is not what I'm doing.

Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.

Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.

[Tibet] is a small country based on religious principle, religious traditions. It never wanted any conquest.