Caring People

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers--so many caring people in this world.
--Fred Rogers (Mister Rogers)

Humans

It was not simply a question of rescheduling a ritual, a party or a gathering; these celebrations, from all the faiths and from none, push back against the dominance of the long winter night. No one is more essential to them than humans between, say, ages 5 and 9, who are balanced between the world of reason and the world of magic.
--Jim Dwyer

Barbarism

Self-government and its institutions--public schools, police and fire departments, the ridiculously underfunded mental-health facilities, and all the people to whom we increasingly begrudge their salaries--are the only things keeping us from falling back into barbarism, and the only things keeping us safe and sane when one of us falls back into it on their own.
--Charles P. Pierce

Amendments

When the Patriot Act was thumbing its nose at the First Amendment, we were told "the Constitution is not a suicide pact." And yet, when the Second Amendment is discussed, the Constitution is very much a suicide pact. The First Amendment is phrased as an absolute. We treat as conditional. The Second is phrased conditionally. We treat it as an absolute.
--Kurt Weldon

Reverence

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
--Garry Wills

Terrible Vastness

Apparitions and massacres both come out of nowhere, like dispatches from a world that's beyond our comprehension, their existence so momentous and irrational that they seem to demand from us items of sacrifice and tribute. It is dark now in Newtown, but they are still laying wreaths and flowers, just as they will for days and days, compelled to commemorate something they can hardly believe happened; to touch a terrible vastness they can't begin to understand.
--Justin Peters

Too Much

Too much information is almost always a turnoff. Note how "Foie Gras" sounds delightful, yet "Spreadable Ruptured Liver" does not.
--Carina Chocano

Right and Wrong

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependent upon popular opinion?
--William Lloyd Garrison

None Of You

People who are not Syrian ask me the most painful question, "Why do your people kill each other?" I usually give long-winded explanations, gesturing with my hands but without eye contact, offering historical and logical precedents of tyranny and oppression and revolution and freedom. But I don't tell them what I should, not out of kindness, but out of pity and because it scares me to admit how hardened I've become over the last 20 months: Don't you dare, even for one second, believe that your people and your cities are immune to what happened to my country, my friend. None of you are.
--Amal Hanano

Intent

To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life's neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

Purpose

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
--Bertrand Russell

Undecided

They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.
--Winston Churchill

Heart

One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It's the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It's the first thing you hear when you're born--or before you're born--and it's the last thing you hear.
--Dave Brubeck

Rules

Following a list of rules, our hearts are not free to dance in response to another--we are only dully plodding along in an imitation waltz.
--Suzanne Clothier

Happen

What could have happened did happen.
--Dan Jenkins

Time

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life, that keeps us feeling terrified and alone. I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time.
--Fiona Apple