"Millions cheer the warriorspilling blood across the ringwhile the one who stands for peaceis ridiculed and shamed.Must hearts forever sufferfrom ignorance and greed?Can bombs heal our soulsor set our spirits free?"

"You are the hybrids of golden worlds and ages splendidly conceived."

"Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen."

"Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace."

"Got just enough room to be a friend of yours. Oh I hope you got room to be a friend of mine."

"This rose of pearl-coated infinity transformsthe diseased slums of a broken heartinto a palace made of psalms and gold."

"In its essence, Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech is one citizen's soul-searing plea with his countrymen""Whites and Blacks""to recognize that racial disparities fueled by unwarranted bigotry were crippling America's ability to shine as a true beacon of democracy in a world filled with people groping their way through suffocating shadows of political turmoil, economic oppression, military mayhem, starvation, and disease."

"Diversity is an aspect of human existence that cannot be eradicated by terrorism or war or self-consuming hatred. It can only be conquered by recognizing and claiming the wealth of values it represents for all."

"Death wins nothing here,gnawing wings that amputate""then spread, lift up, fly."

"In honor of Oprah Winfrey: Even greater than the ability to inspire others with hope is the power to motivate them to give as much to the lives of others as they would give to their own, and to empower them to confront the worst in themselves in order to discover and claim the best in themselves."

"It can be difficult to speak truth to power. Circumstances, however, have made doing so increasingly necessary."

"What hell condemned, let heaven now heal."

"Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them."

"There is no envy, jealousy, or hatred between the different colors of the rainbow. And no fear either. Because each one exists to make the others' love more beautiful."

"A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight."

"What can bombs know of the illuminated fields so golden with heaven in your heart's sacred lands?"

"Everywhere we shine death and life burn into something new."

"Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease."

"History, too, has a penchant for giving birth to itself over and over again, and those whom it appoints agents of change and progress do not always accept their destinies willingly."

"You were born a child of light's wonderful secret- you return to the beauty you have always been."

"Making the choice to exercise compassion is an expression of Love for Humanity and Life itself."

"The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large."

"In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace."

"Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings."

"Love, Mercy, and Grace, sisters all, attend your wounds of silence and hope."

"A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable."

"Compassion crowns the soul with its truest victory."

"Between death and hell a bridge shining silver wings offers his soul hope."

"When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future."

"The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years."

"There is within the human heart a quality of intelligence which has been known to surpass that attributed to the human mind."

"What is this slow blue dream of living, and this fevered death by dreaming?"