The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation the expansion of women's rights or now gay rights I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.

I'm not Candide nor Dr Pangloss but we know that faith moves mountains.

Whoever removes the Cross and its interpretation by the New Testament from the center in order to replace it for example with the social commitment of Jesus to the oppressed as a new center no longer stands in continuity with the apostolic faith.

To be sure the response of faith to revelation which God grants to the creature he chooses and moves with his love occurs in such a way that it is truly the creature that provides the response with its own nature and its natural powers of love.

I'm a believer in belief. Faith is something that works - it causes people to do things it has results. It's an intangible indefinable very real thing. And it moves people sometimes to atrocity. And sometimes to survival.

Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.

When prayer removes distrust and doubt and enters the field of mental certainty it becomes faith and the universe is built on faith.

Faith moves mountains but you have to keep pushing while you are praying.

An illness is like a journey into a far country it sifts all one's experience and removes it to a point so remote that it appears like a vision.