The past is what the present is doing now.

Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality.

So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.

Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share.... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.

Institutions develop because people put a lot of trust in them, they meet real needs, they represent important aspirations, whether it's monasteries, media, or banks, people begin by trusting these institutions, and gradually the suspicion develops that actually they're working for themselves, not for the community.

Christian teaching about sex is not a set of isolated prohibitions; it is an integral part of what the Bible has to say about living in such a way that our lives communicate the character of God.

Serving democracy and nourishing the common good is, for the media, something that requires not only attacking corrupt secrecies in a society, but also defending non-corrupt communication.