C Span Quotes

“While floor statements from today's [congressional] representatives are typically delivered to empty galleries and published into unread oblivion, legislative debates in the Reconstruction era were widely disseminated and closely observed.”
― Andrew Buttaro, The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and the End of Reconstruction

“Religion, like art, is an attempt to deal with the non-rational. That's not irrational. Non-rational. Those powerful forces that inform all of our lives. Love, beauty, the search for meaning, our mortality, grief, alienation, these cannot be empirically measured. It's why Freud said he could never finally write about love. He could write about sex, but he couldn't write about love and religious systems are human creations. God is a human concept. All religious systems are flawed. All of them are finite attempts to deal with the infinite. To deal with those transcendent forces and the need the human beings have for the sacred. And I think art and early religious life, art and religion were not divorced. I think art itself is a religious ritual, certainly an important ritual, and what art and religion are trying to do is acknowledge, preserve, and to a certain extent, explain these forces that make up a complete human being. And I think that is probably one of the great failings of the new atheists and that they don't distinguish between the non-rational and the irrational.”
― Chris Hedges