More people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, my friends, that is true perversion.

I was raised Catholic, and I have an aversion to anyone who takes religion to the extreme.

Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

Once I graduated from university, I wanted to climb and be outdoors as much as possible. I worked as a part-time carpenter and kept up a relationship with The North Face. One thing led to another, and I'm lucky to be where I am now. It was a circuitous path with lots of adventure throughout.

All personality traits have their good side and their bad side. But for a long time, we've seen introversion only through its negative side and extroversion mostly through its positive side.

Mostly I want to talk positive; I wanna talk about a bunch of great kids that I coached and made me look good and the university that I've seen grow from a cow college, which it was, only 12,000 people, and when I came here, we weren't at Pennsylvania State University, we were at Penn State College.

Everybody has adversity in their lives and we all have to find ways of overcoming them. You've got to soldier on, make the best of it, look for the positive in everything.

Mental discipline and tenacity in the face of obstacles are traits that have greatly helped me in both my personal and professional journey thus far. I am also very optimistic by nature and tend to focus on the positive and remain hopeful when faced with adversity.

Like many other people, I grew up with so much adversity and negativity, it would have been easy to get overwhelmed and give in. But by turning negatives into positives, losing into a journey to winning, I have been able to overcome the odds that were against me and change them into motivation for my success.

The beautiful thing about the NFL season is to see a team come together after they get to know each other in the spring and summer. You then go through adversity together and see how you respond. The teams that can respond in a positive way are the teams that are going to be there in the end.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.

I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and also undertook vocal training since a young age. However, it was only during my time at the University of Oxford did the musician in me came alive.

America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.

I'm a black Catholic raised in Decatur, Georgia, which was very gang-infested. Then, I went to an all-white private high school and excelled in sports and wrote poetry, then played football at the University of Georgia, minoring in drama.

I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available.

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

I have a little bit of a pet peeve about how the middle class is depicted in movies. I feel like they tend to be either depicted in a very sentimental way, where everybody has a heart of gold except for the villains you're supposed to hiss at, or there's a sort of indie-style version... When it's done well, it's brilliant, it's 'Blue Velvet.'

Peace can be promoted by the limitation of arms and by the creation of the instrumentality for peaceful settlement of controversies. But it will become a reality only through self-restraint and active effort in friendliness and helpfulness.

My friends wonder how I have the patience to engage with people on Twitter about topics such as diversity and why black British history should be taught in schools: surely it's exhausting? And they're right.