Sometimes the cost of integrity is the loss of a friend.

Truth, beaten down, may well rise again. But there's a reason it gets beaten down. Usually, we don't like it very much.

So long as men and women are free, no one is safe. People will be in danger because others can't operate vehicles responsibly or shoot straight. Because physicians are sometimes incompetent and lawyers dishonest. But most of all they will be in danger from ideas. It is the price we willingly pay to be free. Nor would we have it any other way.

We could never know who we truly were until we heard the whispers of the stars.

Faith has its price. When misfortune strikes the true believer, he assumes he has done something to deserve punishment, but isn't quite certain what. The realist, recognizing that he lives in a Darwinian universe, is simply grateful to have made it to another sunset.

Somewhere we taught ourselves that our opinions are more significant than the facts. And somehow we get our egos and our opinions and Truth all mixed up in a single package, so that when something does challenge one of the notions to which we subscribe, we react as if it challenges us.

It is not faith per se that creates the problem; it is conviction, the notion that one cannot be wrong, that opposing views are necessarily invalid and may even be intolerable.