"I am guilty of living well, and in comfort, and hiding with the shadows of our majestic American steeples. I would hope we could walk out of our comfort, once in a while, to feel the heat of Truth on our faces."

Kevin Max

"We had found a country where people treated one another well, with respect, and where there were values other than grab, grab, grab, which prevails back home. I felt humbled, in a way. Everything about my own country seemed so shoddy and superficial when held up against what I saw in Africa."

"People suffered here, and many of them had very little, but they had this wonderful feeling for others. When I first heard African people calling others - complete strangers - their brother or their sister, it sounded odd to my ears. But after a while I knew exactly what it meant and I started to think the same way.... I wish I could have called my friends 'my sisters' but it would have sounded contrived. But that is how I felt. I was learning lessons. I had come to Africa and I was learning lessons."

Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe

It's a high school prom
It's a Springsteen song
It's a ride in a Chevrolet
It's a man on the moon
And fireflies in June
And kids selling lemonade
It's cities and farms
It's open arms
One nation under God
It's America

It's a kid with a chance
It's a rock and roll band
It's a farmer cutting hay
It's a big flag flying in the summer wind
Over a fallen hero's grave
It's America

-Rodney Atkins, It's America

Now that no one looking

Now that no one looking at the night—
Sky blanked by leakage from electric lamps
And headlights prowling through the parking lot
Could recognize the Babylonian dance
That once held every gazer; now that spoons
And scales, and swordsmen battling with beasts
Have decomposed into a few stars strewn
Illegibly across an empty space,
Maybe the old unfalsifiable
Predictions and extrapolated spheres
No longer need to be an obstacle
To hearing what it is the stars declare:
That there are things created of a size
We can't and weren't meant to understand,
As fish know nothing of the sun that writes
Its bright glyphs on the black waves overhead.

Adam Kirsch

"I'm not sure I want popular opinion on my side -- I've noticed those with the most opinions often have the fewest facts."

Bethania McKenstry

"Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual."

Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times

"Once you start to see through the myth of status, possessions, and unlimited consumption as a path to happiness, you'll find that you have all kinds of freedom and time. It's like a deal you can make with the universe: I'll give up greed for freedom. Then you can start putting your time to good use."

David Edwards, Nothing to Lose But Our Illusions

"As we grow up, we put away our laughter and our silliness and our childish noises, the great sensory hilariousness of our young lives. We pick up a few notions about proper behavior, like what books to read and how to go about getting married and buying a home and being polite and having cocktail parties ... and the next thing you know, the little child - who was also an enormously alive sensory apparatus - is just another boring adult going to work in a seersucker suit with a briefcase."

John Rosenthal