Our nation and those of the developed world must offer our own resistance to despot leaders who seek to commit murder on the basis of religion or race.

We are pre-disposed for fantasy there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.

Art and Religion are then two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

I found enormous opposition to my religion. It's like if you want to strengthen your biceps you lift heavy weight as heavy as you can handle and work your muscles against resistance until it grows strong. I had to do that with my religion.

Well right now I'm very fascinated with 1920s Berlin. I mean probably the more interesting thing would be to go to the beginning of civilization or precivilization - like polytheistic times. It would be interesting to see what came before modern religion and culture - what circumstances created the environment or the need for it.

The major obstacle to a religious renewal is the intellectual classes who are highly influential and tend to view religion as primitive superstition. They believe that science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

There are tens of thousands of interactions every single day across Afghanistan between the Afghan troops and International Security Assistance Force. On most of those every single day we continue to deepen and broaden the relationship we seek.

Every relationship I've been in becomes long-distance because of work. It's never worked out. It puts an intense strain on the relationship and at a certain point it becomes too difficult.

Obviously a long-distance relationship is hard. But like anything worth having you make it work.