"Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. "The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; he was now browsing among the tulips."

"A man can keep silence in such a ways that no one will even notice it. The whole point is that we say a good deal too much. If we limited ourselves to what is actually necessary, this alone would be k…"

"Having now visited Termini Imerese, I can't help but be filled with admiration for my great-grandfather. To think of that journey- from a coastal city in Sicily to Chicago and finally to Dubuque, Iowa…"

"There are tremendous actual differences in values. Some value systems, such as the ones that motivate "honor killings", deserve to be morally condemned and rejected. But there are many other variation…"

"After the wretched fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem, after the lamentable slaughter of the people of Christendom, after the deplorable invasion of that land on which the feet of Christ had stood, and …"