To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks.

The hope of eternal life is not to be taken up upon slight grounds. It is a subject to be settled between God and your own soul; settled for eternity. A supposed hope, and nothing more, will prove your ruin.

The truth is that those who join gangs - more often than not they are young men in their later teens - often do come from the most difficult family backgrounds, from an environment where they feel neglected and unwanted. Gang membership can bring a perverse sense of belonging which they may not have ever got at home.

Future peace, prosperity and confidence depend not just on ourselves but on the success of all nations. Hence, we are all partners, no matter what our backgrounds, cultures, faiths and histories.

I'm very upset that the Supreme Court ruled that citizens don't have standing to challenge the faith based initiatives on constitutional grounds.

During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely, enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely, Occam's razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.

Equality of outcome is a discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds, as anyone knows who has studied the misery of the 20th century.

The Ledbetter Act is aimed at equality. But individuals are not equal. We all have different talents, resources, interests, abilities, educations, and backgrounds.

We must remember that although we come from different backgrounds and ideologies, we're all part of this great experiment in self-governance. We're all united by common values of liberty, justice, and equality of opportunity, even if we don't always agree on how to achieve them.

Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.

By providing every student with a quality education, and the materials they need for class and to do their homework, we can help students from all backgrounds learn and thrive.

Someone who'll bring some normalcy into my life and help me stay in touch with reality. That is something I'm curious about. There are so many actors who are married to people from non-film backgrounds, and their marriages are successful. I'm tired of dating actresses.

We need business leaders who have a respect for technical issues even if they don't have technical backgrounds. In a lot of U.S. industries, including cars and even computers, many managers don't think of technology as a core competency, and this attitude leads them to farm out technical issues.

I wanted to have more songs with religious backgrounds. The Christmas record has strong, traditional hymns, but it also has a song called 'Christmas in Heaven' about missing someone that you love that's passed on, and wondering what's going on up there on Christmas.

Some campaigns are not worth waging if you can't win; others have to be fought on grounds of principle regardless of the chances for success.

You walk into the playgrounds in Shanghai and Beijing, and you see youngsters who are shorter, shaking and baking and having attitude. And Jeremy Lin is going to inspire all of them.

The Senator from Massachusetts has given us ample grounds to doubt the judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security.

People in big studios are like, 'People want to see other people who are skinny and happy and amazing.' But I think, nowadays, they are realising that what sells is real people from all different backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures and size. People want to see themselves represented on screen, and it's a real cool thing for everyone.

Your roots will always show you the importance of holding on to what grounds you but don't ignore the lessons the leaves are trying to teach you -Michaela Angemeer

It would be a mistake, though, to consider care by family doctors or midwives inferior to that offered by obstetricians simply on the grounds that obstetricians need not refer care to a family physician or midwife if no complications develop during a course of labor.

"Some years ago, there was a lovely philosopher of science and journalist in Italy named Giulio Giorello, and he did an interview with me. And I don't know if he wrote it or not, but the headline in Corriere della Sera when it was published was "S?, abbiamo un'anima. Ma ? fatta di tanti piccoli robot ? "Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of lots of tiny robots." And I thought, exactly. That's the view. Yes, we have a soul, but in what sense? In the sense that our brains, unlike the brains even of dogs and cats and chimpanzees and dolphins, our brains have functional structures that give our brains powers that no other brains have - powers of look-ahead, primarily. We can understand our position in the world, we can see the future, we can understand where we came from. We know that we're here. No buffalo knows it's a buffalo, but we jolly well know that we're members of Homo sapiens, and it's the knowledge that we have and the can-do, our capacity to think ahead and to reflect and to evaluate and to evaluate our evaluations, and evaluate the grounds for our evaluations.

We do not have to be ashamed of what we are. As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds. These backgrounds may not be particularly enlightened or peaceful or intelligent. Nevertheless, we have soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it.

We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.

in this case, a mother, noted for her beauty, might be reduced to a purple shadow... (Tansley to Lily on her painting of the house & grounds)