You can't have a United States if you are telling some folks that they can't get on the train. There is a cracking point where a society collapses.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

It was generally believed that Catholics were not interested in arts and science graduate schools. They weren't going to be intellectuals. And so I put the theses to the test. And they all collapsed.

Censorship is saying: 'I'm the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say the conclusion is mine.' But the internet is like a tree that is growing. The people will always have the last word - even if someone has a very weak quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen a lot of them will.

When I look back on my childhood I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life like radioactive elements.

Your home is regarded as a model home your life as a model life. But all this splendor and you along with it... it's just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come a word can be spoken and both you and all this splendor will collapse.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Great effort is required to arrest decay and restore vigor. One must exercise proper deliberation plan carefully before making a move and be alert in guarding against relapse following a renaissance.

Billy is a funny cheeky lovely boy and I love being with him. Parenthood is terrifying though. I can barely walk past a building without panicking that it's going to collapse on his head.

No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth.

The essence of true friendship is to make allowance for another's little lapses.

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.

America cannot continue to lead the family of nations around the world if we suffer the collapse of the family here at home.

I don't think it's any coincidence that I lost my religious faith and 'manned up' in the same year. I was described somewhere as a lapsed Catholic which is funny because I'm not going back! I want to achieve things rather than live life in an animalistic way.

I'm a lapsed Quaker. I don't go to meetings any more. But I'm very drawn to Catholicism - all that glitter. I'd love to be a Catholic. I think it would be fantastic - faith forgiveness absolution extreme unction - all these wonderful words. I don't think anyone who was ever born a Catholic hasn't died a Catholic no matter how lapsed they are.

No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.

Has Bill Clinton inspired idealism in the young as he himself was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Or has he actually reduced their idealism? Surely part of the answer lies in Clinton's personal moral lapse with Monica Lewinsky. But more important was his sin of omission - his failure to embrace a moral cause beyond popularity.

Rather than viewing a brief relapse back to inactivity as a failure treat it as a challenge and try to get back on track as soon as possible.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

It has always amazed me how tax cuts don't work until they take effect. Mr. Obama's experience with deferred tax rate increases will be the reverse. The economy will collapse in 2011.

The scientific argument advanced for intelligent design at the Dover trial those arguments collapsed scientifically and intellectually.