America's downgrade may serve as a wakeup call for its policymakers. It is an unambiguous and loud signal of the country's eroding economic strength and global standing. It renders urgent the need to regain the initiative through better economic policymaking and more coherent governance.

God grant you the strength to fight off the temptations of surrender.

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender that is strength.

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us the control over the world that that can render.

It feels really sad to me to go to a dark bedroom. It's like surrendering to the night or something.

Religion may be defined thus: a belief in and homage rendered to existences unseen and causes unknown.

Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature. art and religion.

I'm actually an evangelical atheist but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

I never saw heard nor read that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular but some degree of persecution.

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it as an artist you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material and that's a creepy thing to do.