“War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.”

True redemption is when guilt leads to good.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

But then it passed, as all things do.

When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.

In many parts of the world, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.

There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

It’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.

And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.

It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.

Love must neither beg nor demand. Love must be strong enough to find certainty within itself. It then cease to be moved and becomes the mover.

I am like any other man. All I do is supply a demand.

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all.

I’ll put an end to the idea that a woman’s body belongs to her. Nazi ideals demand that the practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand.

People who demand a long life are actually the ones who suffer life. Blessed are those people who live their whole life in a blink of an eye.

Doctors cut, burn, and torture the sick, and then demand of them an undeserved fee for such services.

A love that demands love will burn the very essence of what once made it pure.