"I once asked a distinguished biologist to explain to me the genetic imprint, the famous double helix which differentiates one being from another. He called it "the graffito of God", because it can never be erased. All other imprints — of memory, environment, experience — he called "human graffiti"."

"In politics there is no morality anyway. The nature of the game precludes it. A politician's career depends upon the fickle wind of public opinion. He is forced to trim his conscience to catch every shift of the breeze."

"Every tribe in the world had its own version of the scapegoat, marked for exile or persecution when the homefolk needed to purge themselves of their own guilts."

"When friends do business, there is no need of contracts. Unfortunately, there are no friends in business."

"Of all the animals in creation, politicians have the shortest memories."

"You are all caught in the current of history whose headwaters rise in the dark mountains of the past. You cannot change it; you survive and help others to survive by adapting to it."

"It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price…. One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying."

"Nothing is permanent. Tomorrow the caravan moves on. The wheels turn. The flowers bloom and die. The good we do in bad times is a seed planted for others to harvest. Evil is a dark hole in creation, where good may once have flourished, where it may take root again one starlit night, when the wounded world murmurs in a healing sleep."

"I can write no more today. The contemplation of my sorry state has reduced me to so deep a melancholy that I contemplate opening my wrist like Petronius Arbiter and lapsing quietly into oblivion. Unlike Petronius, however, I shall have neither the sound of music nor the gentle talk of friends. I still have time to choose a better moment — besides, who knows to what nightmares I might awake."

"The prevalence of evil is the darkest and most frightening mystery of the universe."

"Rossini was gentle with her. "In one way or another,we all have to cope with the essential solitude of being human, whether we're celibate or married." "If you're a good person, doesn't God fill your loneliness?" "He fills it, I think, with a divine discontent.""

"My father used to say that we surrendered our youth to purchase wisdom. What he never told me was how badly we get cheated on the exchange rate!"

"Religion is the good you do in the bad times."

"[W]hen you get to Rome you have two other rules to learn: never assume that what you see is what is; never believe that what you're told is the whole truth. It's only when you've grasped that — and the Romans know you've grasped it — that you begin to win respect and make progress."

"That's what faith is about — living with paradox."

""Forbear to ask what tomorrow may bring" … If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine."

"Once you accept the existence of God — however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him — then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things. You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage."

"Who said to me, a foetus in the womb, a puling babe, "You have your life, but on the condition that you thus believe?" No one! Not even God! So gentlemen, I say you have no right to make terms for my life. I tell you then — No! I will not recant."

"I'm a Nolan. I could dazzle you in dialect, because the words do not make the same sense to different men."

"You I admire as being more, — much more — a man, and more believer too, than half the canting orthodox."

"To make that long, last donkey-ride between the pikeman and the stake, to hear the shouting and the chant of hypocrites, to be a spectacle for animals in human masks!"

"I wonder how it will read five hundred years from now? — To make a man confess a loving God you burn him!"

"O Mother of Christ, who saw what men could do to one who heard an alien music! Bend to me, be tender. I am blind and deaf and dumb. And yet I do see visions, shout a kind of praise, feel in my pulse apocalyptic drums."