If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man.

Fyodor Dostoyevski

"Even walking down the street, to a certain extent, how do we know there's not a crook with a gun hiding under a burqa? Who's under that gown?" he said.
He was tolerant of all religions, but Muslims who wore burqas because of deeply held beliefs should "go back to Islam or Iraq".


Bob Clarkson - National (right wing) MP (making a fool of himself)

...We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits... so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth -
'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."

- George Bernard Shaw, as quoted by an advertisement in last week's Economist by Steorn challenging the world's scientific community to validate their claims of a machine producing clean free energy (in defiance of the law of conservation of energy).

“Sometimes … I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

- (Julia) Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

The whole history of science has been the gradual realisation that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

Stephen Hawking

Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes

Pope John Paul II

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the framing of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the freeman how to praise.

- from "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," by W. H. Auden

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life

- Pablo Picasso

__What did you learn this week?
__That God is handsome..and that i am handsome too.
__Yeah, why is that?
__Because i am made in his image.

[dialogue between Laura, a leader here, and Krissy, a camper with special needs]

...we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

-George Eliot, Middlemarch

"When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers."

- chinese proverb

"Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature."

-Sherlock Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle