On September 11 2001, America felt its vulnerability even to threats that gather on the other side of the Earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat from any source that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.

Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don’t get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

In America, there’s a failure to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world.

The American people are so much stronger, so much more resolved than any enemy can fully understand.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

In Britain, like most of the developed world, stem-cell research is regarded as a great opportunity. America will be left behind if it doesn’t change policy.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.

America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, ‚Why god? Why me?‘ and the thundering voice of God answered, ‚There’s just something about you that pisses me off.‘

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

The spirit of America has nurtured responsibility and community unlike any other country.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

The hardest thing for – not only an artist but for anybody to do is look themselves in the mirror and acknowledge, you know, their own flaws and fears and imperfections and put them out there in the open for people to relate to it.

I hope not to define myself by suffering.

America is just downright mean.

I never fall in love.

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.

We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing.

I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

The example that America knows how to govern itself is one of the compelling aspects of our national security.

We can’t allow the world’s worst leaders to blackmail, threaten, hold freedom-loving nations hostage with the world’s worst weapons.

Cursing is invoking the assistance of a spirit to help you inflict suffering. Swearing on the other hand, is invoking, only the witness of a spirit to an statement you wish to make.

Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner.

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

I’m not frightened of appearing vulnerable.

It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.

As international support for Obama’s decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

Indeed, we’re strongest when the face of America isn’t only a soldier carrying a gun but also a diplomat negotiating peace, a Peace Corps volunteer bringing clean water to a village, or a relief worker stepping off a cargo plane as floodwaters rise.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

It’s so much easier to like people, and to let people in, to trust them until they prove that you should do otherwise. The alternative is being an iceberg.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love; there’s only scarcity of resolve to make it happen.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

So long as our Corps fields such Marines, America has nothing to fear from tyrants, be they Fascists, Communists or Tyrants with Medieval Ideology. For we serve in a Corps with no institutional confusion about our purpose: To fight! To fight well!

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I, therefore, intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

I love America, it’s a much more permissive place.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.