And I am an optimistic person. I guess if you want to try to find something to be pessimistic about, you can find it, no matter how hard you look, you know?
Several incidents in my life have convinced me of spiritual interposition - of the promptings of some beneficent force outside ourselves, which tries to help us where it can.
Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.
By examining characters lighting the way to hell, as it were, are readers spared iniquity? Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.
Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission. Extremists will continue to set off bombs, attack Iraqi civilians and try to spark sectarian strife. But ultimately, these terrorists will fail to achieve their goals.
I take the Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that we're facing right now have to do with [the president] trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that's what I intend to reverse when I'm President of the United States of America.