The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.

We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.

It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.

I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting -- the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.

The world is not given by our fathers but borrowed from our children.

You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.