Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.
What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.
If God is dead, somebody is going to have to take his place. It will be megalomania or erotomania, the drive for power or the drive for pleasure, the clenched fist or the phallus, Hitler or Hugh Hefner.
A big win for [Hillary] Clinton would allow her to claim that the country rejected Trumpism, while a narrow win leaves her limping into office with the highest unfavorable ratings for any new president.
If [Hillary] Clinton can't boost African-American turnout, even with all that help, the question becomes whether she can make up for it with historic levels of support from Hispanics and suburban women.
People have a lot of strange relationships with food. There's a lot more going on there than just, 'Oh, these crullers remind me of my childhood.' We have a darker and more complex relationship to food.
At the heart of globalisation is a new kind of intolerance in the west towards other cultures, traditions and values, less brutal than in the era of colonialism, but more comprehensive and totalitarian.
Greg Gutfeld is funnier than all the smart people I know, and smarter than all the funny people I know. I don't know what that makes him. But one of the smartest, funniest people I know, is fair to say.
General David Petraeus was so successful at getting on covers of magazines, having journalists fall in love with him, that in fact he was able to use that power to go around the normal chain of command.
Obama's people will all often complain about how trivial and silly the media is, but there's no president who's probably benefited from this sort of trivialness or superficial nature as President Obama.
One answer is that the towns elected officials thought that the project served a public purpose and that the various subsidies and favors were worth the price. But they may or may not have thought this.
We in Britain do not have the same capabilities as the United States, but we are members of the United Nations Security Council. And we take our obligations and duties deriving from that very seriously.
From sitting down with West Timorese, to spending endless hours with the Afghan Taliban; to have sat with Al Qaeda after 9/11 I've always found myself crossing into the unknown - to the darker recesses.
One danger, when you're writing lots of quick, opinionated blog items about the latest developments, is that you never get around to stating fully, in one place, what you think about a particular topic.
Trump is a cultural candidate for president, not an economic one. He clearly loves America and wants America to stay America. America won't be America if it has open borders and mass Muslim immigration.
When a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refuse to defend it--at that moment you begin to die. And I have never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice.
One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot
While I am sure there are a number of women who secretly wonder whether they are lesbian, most simply have, somewhere, a fantasy about having sex, in a non-defining, non-exclusive way, with other women.
You can find a mentor; you have to ask questions, you have to show interest in what the other person is doing. You have to have curiosity - I think that people appreciate that and will want to help you.
One of the most magical places on Earth is a small island in the Caribbean called Mustique. With brilliant beaches, warm water, and lush vegetation, this tiny green swath of land is my idea of paradise.
Consciousness-raising is at the very least supposed to bring about an intimacy, but what it seems instead to bring about are the trappings of intimacy, the illusion of intimacy, a semblance of intimacy.
The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription.
A world without a proper day of rest is like a landscape without hedgerows, trees, or landmarks: a howling, featureless wilderness in which we incessantly seek pleasure because we cannot find happiness.
In 2009, Hamas was relatively new to power. It had won elections just three years earlier and was flexing its newfound strength via a war with its old enemy, Israel, which it officially wants destroyed.
I am not angry. I am just disappointed that, once again, a hotel has tried to convince me it will move heaven and earth to ensure I am comfortable when, in reality, it won't even pass me the coffee pot!
And new people come in, and it doesn't go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can't silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.
In practice, the ocean is the world's wildest place because of both its fearsome natural danger and how easy it is out there to slip from the boundaries of law and civilization that seem so firm ashore.
My first memory as a child growing up is of playing in the gardens, the mosque is really a gigantic garden, probably the biggest in all of East Jerusalem. Our house was about 100 meters from the mosque.
The quality of life in America is dependent on the quality of the journalism. Most people don't realize that, but if you think about it, journalism is one of the pillars on which our society is perched.
When you are talking to 7 million viewers across the country, man you have got to represent everybody's views and have got to give them the impression that you are being as honest as you know how to be.
Basically, I suffer from a genetic condition that causes my corneas to tear all the time. If it's happened to you even once, you know how agonizing it can be - for me, it was happening on a daily basis.
In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.
Mental illness doesn't choose the most talented or the smartest or the richest or the poorest. It shows no mercy and often arrives like an unexpected storm, dropping an endless downpour on young dreams.
When I was growing up, my parents told me, 'Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.' I tell my daughters, 'Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job.'
Nature is regulating our climate for free. Mother Nature, she's been doing that for free, for a long, long time. Now do you really want to get in there and do geo-engineering and all this kind of stuff?
When the Eagle landed on the moon, I was speechless—overwhelmed, like most of the world. Couldn't say a word. I think all I said was, 'Wow! Jeez!' Not exactly immortal. Well, I was nothing if not human.
If my former self and my current self met for coffee, they'd get along OK, but they'd both probably walk out of the Starbucks shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “That guy is kinda delusional.”
LIVER, n. A large red organ thoughtfully provided by nature to be bilious with. The liver is heaven's best gift to the goose; without it that bird would be unable to supply us with the Strasbourg "pate".
NECTAR, n. A drink served at banquets of the Olympian deities. The secret of its preparation is lost, but the modern Kentuckians believe that they come pretty near to a knowledge of its chief ingredient.
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
An ideology that divides the world into those who are worth more and those who are worth less, into superior and inferior beings, does not have to reach the dimensions of the German genocide to be wrong.
Having no diplomatic representation in Washington, China has no sources which allow her to check the character of applicants and therefore makes the practice of refusing everybody from the United States.
Donald Trump may undermine some of the traditional checks on the presidency: the press in particular, but also the various government and Congressional ethics bodies, as well as the career civil service.
There is no fun equal to the satisfaction of doing one's best. The things that are most worthwhile in life are really those within the reach of almost every normal human being who cares to seek them out.
Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.
The United States, a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, destroyed the last of its stocks of VX and other chemical agents on the Johnston Atoll, 825 miles southwest of Hawaii, in November 2000.
I think the problem in the Republican Party is really not money. I think they've got lots of it. I think it is theory of the case - why are we here, what is our message, how to connect to the real world.
I was both charmed and moved by Midday with Buuel, Mexican filmmaker and writer Claudio Isaac's personal and very poetic recollection of his friendship with his mentor, the Spanish surrealist Luis Buuel.
It happens to be a matter of record that I was first in print with the discovery that the tastelessness of the food offered in American clubs varies in direct proportion to the exclusiveness of the club.
I'm not a Luddite at all. I love all this stuff. I look at all the gadgets that come out and I think, 'Oh, this fix works for me. But the rest don't.' I'm not genuflecting in front of the God of Newness.