“No one can claim to be called Christian who gives money for the building of warships and arsenals.”

I do not believe in sex distinction in literature, law, politics, or trade-or that modesty and virtue are more becoming to women than to men, but wish we had more of it everywhere.

We can’t abolish prejudice through laws.

I know we can’t abolish prejudice through laws, but we can set up guidelines for our actions by legislation.

If nations could only depend upon fair and impartial judgments in a world court of law, they would abandon the senseless, savage practice of war.

Reforms are slow, but they never go backward.

Men always say, “Let’s see what you can do.” If we always talk and never work we will not accomplish anything.

The glory of each generation is to make its own precedents.

I think people need housing. And there’s empty buildings, I think people should live in there.

When the president during the campaign said he was against nation building,

With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgandies and matte reds.

More people are interested in trying to shuffle paper assets around than building lasting assets by producing real goods.

Otherwise, I think the building can be bigger, larger, and the city can be much more crazy. The problem is the government structure is so deadly stupid, not really solving problems but creating a lot of problems itself every day.

Rooms are a fixed size, which can’t be altered without pulling down walls and building new ones.

The strategy for peace-building in Afghanistan is economic aid, reconstruction, international security forces. On those lines, the U.S. has been extremely slow. And it has even blocked expanding security forces from Kabul to other cities.

I can play with that opportunity or not. This is my right, or poetic license, as someone who is building an artefact of fantasy – this implicit pact with the reader is my starting point.