When we can become really honest with ourselves, and deeply ponder what we want, where we want to go, what we want to do, we are at the perfect beginning, because we are, right at that moment, at the heart of who we are, and any action taken from that place is going to be a glorious one.

-- "i have chosen to stay and fight,"
by Margaret Cho

Strange, there's so much religion in the world, but only enough to make us fight over who is right, not enough to make us love one another.

-- "i have chosen to stay and fight,"
by Margaret Cho

Why do we not believe hysterical women? Hysterical women are always right.

-- "i have chosen to stay and fight,"
by Margaret Cho

The hotness is not about age, looks, body type, race; it's about honesty, knowing who you are and being who you are, without trying to front yourself as being better than you really are. It's about the deep-down authenticity of self, then looking it, living it, loving it.

-- "i have chosen to stay and fight,"
by Margaret Cho

What people need to understand is that the pussy is the Front Door of Life. Do you get that? Nobody really thinks about it like that up in the dusty ancient cabinet of old white men that think they know everything. Woman has the right to let someone in, or to tell them to come back another time, or even to have a sign that says NO SOLICITORS. Woman has the right to be exalted, cherished and respected. Woman has the right to choose, to choose for herself, for her own body, for her own life. Feminism is nonnegotiable. Word to your mother.

-- "i have chosen to stay and fight,"
by Margaret Cho

Do we forget our roots when we move on up, or do we take them with us and continue to fight for racial equality? Do we have a responsibility to fight for those who still struggle for a piece of American pie, or can we merely savor what we have and let everyone else fend for themselves, and live in the penthouse of privilege without the guilt of obligation? Finally, has our own attainment of unprecedented affluence allowed us to ignore everyone we consider "less than" because it feels justified?

-- "i have chosen to stay and fight,"
by Margaret Cho

The terrible thing about invisibility is the lengths we will go to be seen.

-- "i have chosen to stay and fight,"
by Margaret Cho

I felt like a Jane Austen heroine all of a sudden ..., confusedly looking on at all the people she loves, their myriad unpredictable couplings and uncouplings. ... Just jokes and friendships and romances and delicious declarations of independence. ... We none of us knew for sure what kind we were, exactly, but as long as we were the kind that could sit around eating together and having a lovely time, that was enough.

-- "Julie and Julia,"
by Julie Powell

Jesus had but to give a nod of agreement and he could have constructed Christendom, not on four shaky Gospels and a defeated man nailed on a Cross, but on a basis of sound socio-economic planning and principles .... Every utopia could have been brought to pass, every hope have been realized and every dream been made to come true. What a benefactor, then, Jesus would have been. Acclaimed, equally, in the London School of Economics and the Harvard Business School; a statue in Parliament Square, and an even bigger one on Capitol Hill and in the Red Sqaure .... Instead, he turned the offer down on the ground that only God should be worshipped.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from
"The Jesus I Never Knew,"
by Philip Yancey

... the gospel accounts of the first Christmas ... Jesus was born far from home, with no midwife, extended family, or village chorus present. ... How many times did Mary review the angel's words as she felt the Son of God kicking against the walls of her uterus? ... We know nothing of Jesus' grandparents. What must they have felt? ... it seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for his entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism. ... And so Jesus the Christ entered the world amid strife and terror, and spent his infancy hidden in Egypt as a refugee. ... Unimaginably, the Maker of all things shrank down, down, down, so small as to become an ovum, a single fertilized egg barely visible to the naked eye, an egg that would divide and redivide until a fetus took shape, enlarging cell by cell inside a nervous teenager. ... The God who roared, who could order armies and empires about like pawns on a chessboard, this God emerged in Palestine as a baby who could not speak or eat solid food or control his bladder, who depended on a teenager for shelter, food, and love. ... A mule could have stepped on him. ...The God who created matter took shape within it, ... [t]he Word became flesh. ... How did God the Father feel that night, helpless as any human father, watching his Son emerge smeared with blood to face a harsh, cold world? ... God, who knows no before or after, entered time and space. God, who knows no boundaries took on the shocking confines of a baby's skin, the ominous restraints of mortality.

"The Jesus I Never Knew,"
by Philip Yancey

Unconditional love. That's what this is. I love him, as is, fully. I've had to stop arm wrestling with the facts. Why me? Didn't I already have a big love once? And lost it? So why should I get it again? I've had to stop trying to look for cracks and flaws to prove that it's not as good as it seems. Because it's as good as it seems. Even when we fight, we fight inside the container of good. Somehow, through a flip of the coin, I ended up here. Feeling like somebody at the top of the heart-lung transplant recipient list. Damaged but invigorated and fucking lucky.

-- "Magical Thinking,"
by Augusten Burroughs

What's painful and wonderful about loving somebody is loving their small things, like the way he is able to smile when he sips his wine, the way his hands fall down at his sides, fingers slightly cupped, or the way he is conducting the orchestra on the radio. Or now, the way he is lighting candles, just now this one in front of me. This is the one he lit first, actually. The one in front of me. Even though there was one on the way, he passed that one, lit it next.

-- "Magical Thinking,"
by Augusten Burroughs

It's strange to remember someone you've known all along. It isn't like returning to the home you grew up in and noticing how it left its shape on you, how the walls you've raised and the doors you've opened since then have all followed the design you saw for the first time there. It's closer to returning home and seeing your mother or sister, who are old enough not to have grown since you last saw them but young enough not to have aged, and realizing for the first time how they look to everyone else, how beautiful they would be if you didn't know them, what your father and brother-in-law saw when they judged them most and knew them least.

"The Rule of Four,"
by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

We worship money instead of honor. A billionaire, in our estimation, is much greater in these days in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for public interest. It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor. No one ever considered Carnegie libraries steeped in the blood of the Homestead steelworkers, but they are. We do not remember that the Rockefeller Foundation is founded on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and a dozen other similar performances. We worship Mammon; and until we go back to ancient fundamentals and return to the Giver of the Tables of Law and His teachings, these conditions are going to remain with us. It is a pity that Wall Street, with its ability to control all the wealth of the nation and to hire the best law brains in the coutnry, has not produced some statesmen, some men who could see the dangers of bigness and of the concentration of the control of wealth. Instead of working to meet the situation, they are still employing the best law brains to serve greed and self interest. People can stand only so much, and one of these days there will be a settlement.


-- Harry S. Truman, in "Truman," by David McCullough

Some others have a notion that if they can get high offices and hold up themselves as models of virtue to a gaping public in long-winded high-sounding speeches that they have reached the highest pinnacle of success. It seems to me that the ability to hand out self-praise makes most men successes in their own minds anyway. Some of the world's greatest failures are really greater than some of the other kind. To succeed financially a man can't have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egoist or a fool or a ward boss tool. To my notion, an ideal condition would be to have to work just enough so if you stopped you'd not go busted at once -- but still you'd know if you didn't work you couldn't live. And then have your home and friends and pleasures regulated to your income, say a thousand a month. I am sure I'd be satisfied then to let vile ambition, political or monetary, starve at the gate.

-- Harry S. Truman, 1913 letter to Bess Wallace,
"Truman," by David McCullough