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Indispensable nation? If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future. (Interview on NBC-TV "The Today Show" with Matt Lauer, Columbus, Ohio, February 19, 1998, defending the US role in enforcing an embargo on Iraq in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991. Historian James Chace and President Bill Clinton presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal apparently coined the term in 1996 to capture the essence of Clinton’s liberal-internationalist vision of the post–Cold War world. President Bill Clinton used it in his January 20, 1997, inauguration speech and in a 1998 speech outlining the rationale for the NATO’s intervention in Bosnia. President Barack Obama used the phrase at least twice, in his January 24, 2012, State of the Union Address and May 2012 commencement address at the US Air Force Academy Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton repeated the "indispensable nation" claim in a February 2013 speech and again in her 2014 book, Hard Choices. — anonymous

In a New York Times Book Review interview, singer-author Jessye Norman was asked “What was the last truly great book you read?” Norman responded: “The Law of Love and the Law of Violence by Leo Tolstoy. I cannot explain this great book, this guide to nonviolence, better than to take a short passage from it: ‘True religion consists in establishing the relation of each of us towards the infinite life that surrounds us, the life that unites us to the infinite, and guides us in all our acts.’” — anonymous

On Sunday 11 May 2014 Germany’s energy needed set a new record, nearly 75%, for renewable energy generation. — anonymous

Recalling cynically those politicians who gush on about gallantry and sacrifice in warfare, E.B. Sledge, a veteran of the World War II campaigns at Peleliu and Okinawa wrote, “The words seemed so ridiculous. Only the flies benefited.” — anonymous

It is common, as William Sloan Coffin notes, that we are prone to use the Bible as a drunk uses a lamppost—for support rather than illumination. — anonymous

In late 2012 the Center for Responsive Politics reported that for the first time in history more than half of Congress—535 Representatives and Senators—are millionaires. In fact, the average net worth for all lawmakers is more than $7 million. Whereas 40% of US citizens’ net worth is zero or less. — anonymous