One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude and amending the error.

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

I have been particularly struck with the overwhelming evidence which is given as to the fitness of the natives of India for high offices and employments.

The FHA's success provides strong evidence that government can and should play a role in the nation's mortgage finance system. It also demonstrates that although government intervention in the economy during the Great Recession was messy things would have been a lot messier without it.

A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear but not that thing.

To a certain extent I am taking a leap of faith. I'm adding up the evidence on either side and I'm seeing the evidence of there not being a God is overwhelming compared to the evidence for there being a God.

Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence. Faith is daring to do something regardless of the consequences.

Faith means intense usually confident belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.

The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms and in forty years of searching none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief.

Religious faith depends on a host of social psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities evidence and logic.