'CONFLICT IS EVERYWHERE: water hitting rock, teachers pushing students to learn, or wolves trying to coexist with ranchers. It is our call to evolve. It challenges us to look beyond our current views to an expanded reality. It is a relentless teacher that asks us to see unity where before we found opposites.'
DEIDRE COMBS, mediation specialist, quoted in Sacred Journey (Feb./March 2005)

'PITY IS THE totalitarianism of the righteous.'
JOHN DURHAM PETERS, communications scholar, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (University of Chicago)

'POLITICS IS a wrestling match with chaos, and it prizes those who seem best able to impose their will upon the impossible.'
DON WATSON, former speechwriter, Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weasel Words, and Management-Speak are Strangling Public Language (Gotham Books)

'OUR HEARTS ARE NOT PURE; our hearts are filled with need and greed as much as with love and grace, and we wrestle with our hearts all the time. The wrestling is who we are. How we wrestle is who we are. What we want to be is never what we are. Not yet. Maybe that's why we have these relentless engines in our chests, driving us forward toward what we might be.'
BRIAN DOYLE, essayist, Orion (Jan./Feb. 2005)

'WHY IS IT that some people refuse, or are unwilling, to go back to a place where once they have been happy?'
M.F.K. FISHER, writer, The Measures of Her Power (Counterpoint)

'I DON'T HEAR the cactus explaining his-self, / nor the mimosa tree chattering in the front yard why it is / the color it is, / nor the water as it streams down hill / telling me it has to do so . . .'
JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA, poet, The Nieve Roja Review (#2)