“But for all we’ve lost, hope is in fact one thing we Japanese have regained. The great earthquake and tsunami have robbed us of many lives and resources. But we who were so intoxicated with our own prosperity have once again planted the seed of hope. So I choose to believe.”

“I believe that one of Satan’s biggest lies is telling us that it’s too late. We’ve sinned beyond redemption. The mistakes in our past have ruined our future. Too many bad things have happened to us. Wishing and hoping and living in regret doesn’t threaten him because we are still in Moab. It’s when we make the decision to leave the past behind, repent, and go back home to Bethlehem that he gets to trembling.”

“I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong - and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System.”

“We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”

“Our great American philosopher William James has said - "We have as many personalities as there are people who know us." To which I would add "We have no personalities unless there are people who know us. Unless there are people we hope to convince that we deserve to exist.”

“So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it –– we all get to dream.”