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“Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”

“So death obscures your gentle form, So memory strives to make the darkness bright; And, in that heap of rocks, your body lies, Part of the island till the planet ends, My gentle comrade, beautiful and wise, Part of this crag this bitter surge offends, While I, who pass, a little obscure thing, War with this force, and breathe, and am its king.”

“Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.”

“We talk about spreading democracy and freedom all over the world, but they are to us words rather than conditions. We haven't even got them here in America, and the farther we get into this war the farther we get away from democracy and freedom. Where is it leading us to, and when will it end? The war might stop this winter, but that is improbable. It may go on for fifty years or more. That also is improbable. The elements are too conflicting and confused to form any accurate judgment of its length. There may be a series of wars, one after another, going on indefinitely.”

“The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.”

“See plastic Nature working to this end, The single atoms each to other tend, Attract, attracted to, the next in place Form'd and impell'd its neighbor to embrace.”

“In every remodelling of the present, the existing condition of things must be supplanted by a new one. Now every variety of circumstances in which men find themselves, every object which surrounds them, communicates a definite form and impress to their internal nature. This form is not such that it can change and adapt itself to any other a man may choose to receive; and the end is foiled, while the power is destroyed, when we attempt to impose upon that which is already stamped in the soul a form which disagrees with it.”

“We started off with physical evolution and got our form. Then we somehow developed language, which meant cultural evolution could race so we could change our behavior really quickly instead of over hundreds and hundreds of years. And then comes moral evolution, which means we're not frightfully far along with people. And maybe we end up with a spiritual evolution, which is this connectedness with the rest of the life forms on the planet.”

“This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence -- but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.”

“While the nation that has dared to be great, that has had the will and the power to change the destiny of the ages, in the end must die, yet no less surely the nation that has played the part of the weakling must also die; and whereas the nation that has done nothing leaves nothing behind it, the nation that has done a great work really continues, though in changed form, to live forevermore.”

“Well, if there is a spectrum between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism, which is a rather schematic way of looking at it, all nationalism contains elements of both, but Scotland is very far on the civic end of the spectrum. That is partly because nobody has ever been stupid enough to say that Scotland is an ethnicity in a genetic sense. A kingdom of Scotland existed long before anybody talked of a Scottish people. So that is one thing we have been spared.”

“The most widely discussed formulation of [the One World model] was the "end of history" thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama. "We may be witnessing," Fukuyama argued, "the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." The future will be devoted not to great exhilarating struggles over ideas but rather to resolving mundane economic and technical problems. And, he concluded rather sadly, it will all be rather boring.”

“The conscious mind is a maelstrom of fleeting thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, conflicting desires, and doubts; barely able to confine its attention to a single clear objective for a microsecond before secondary thoughts begin to adulterate it and provoke yet further trains of mental discourse. If you do not believe this, then attempt to confine your conscious attention to the dot at the end of this sentence without involving yourself in any other form of thinking, including thinking about the dot.”

“For - to say a few words on technique - whereas the curved line was used predominantly for reasons of beauty, (Phidias, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens) it has been used more and more economically for reasons of truth (Millet, Monet, Paul Cézanne) until it will end as the straight line for reasons of Love. This will enable the art of the future to create an international form; a form understandable to all and vital enough to the expression of a general feeling of love in a monumental way. Such is the future.”

“If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture, we must have a sophisticated process to form people into adventurer-disciples.”

“All too often, as we know from experience, people do not choose life; they do not accept the gospel of life, but let themselves be led by ideologies and ways of thinking that block life, that do not respect life, because they are dictated by selfishness, self-interest, profit, power and pleasure and not by love. ... As a result, the Living God is replaced by fleeting human idols, which offer the intoxication of a flash of freedom, but in the end bring new forms of slavery and death.”

“Like sex, poverty and power, suicide may always be with us. But like them again, the actual form is takes is essentially time-specific and culture-bound, not only in the past but in the present too. The people who took their lives, the paths which led them to that end, and the experience of dying in this way were deeply influenced by specific historical circumstances. Only by making a greater effort at historical understanding can this most secret house of death be made to yield up more of its confidences.”

“Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.”

“When a republic's most venerable institutions no longer operate as they were intended, it becomes possible for small cabals to usurp power, and, while keeping the forms, corrupt the function of those institutions for their own ends. Looking at things that way, the George W. Bush presidency has been both result and symptom of the decadence of America's constitutional mechanisms.”

“Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, and not a quality; it looks before and after, it gives the form that makes all the parts work together harmoniously toward a given end, its seat is in the higher reason, and it is efficient only as a servant of the will. Imagination, as it is too often misunderstood, is mere fantasy, the image-making power, common to all who have the gift of dreams.”

“I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.”

“We often say, and you have heard the expression as it has already been referred to in this conference, that "as man now is, God once was, and as God now is, man may become." The only way man may become as God now is, is through fulfilling the laws of celestial marriage and the laws of the gospel, as I have just read to you the word of the Lord from the D&C. Can we afford to overlook such opportunities for exaltation? Temple marriage is not just another form of church wedding; it is a divine covenant with the Lord that if we are faithful to the end, we may become as God now is.”

“Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century.”