I mean there are many, many people in all sorts of different countries who don't have a great life, who are subject to injustice. Are we obliged to take all of them who come here? I think the answer is 'Not necessarily.'
In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us.
From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
I don't want to write any more screenplays, I'll tell you that right now. It's a waste of time. You've got too many people who think they have the answer to a good screenplay and they don't. No one knows.
We need to start seeing privacy as a commons - as some kind of a public good that can get depleted as too many people treat it carelessly or abandon it too eagerly. What is privacy for? This question needs an urgent answer.
I'm no good at describing my books. 'Holes' has been out now for seven years, and I still can't come up with a good answer when asked what that book is about.
Advocacy groups and voters are not wrong to push candidates to declare their position clearly on policy issues. That is good citizenship. Hard questions should be asked of every candidate, every politician. And those public servants should be prepare...
Instead of five hundred thousand average algebra teachers, we need one good algebra teacher. We need that teacher to create software, videotape themselves, answer questions, let your computer or the iPad teach algebra... The hallmark of any good tech...
People often ask where I get my inspiration from, and I always say I have no good answer because, well, inspiration comes from everywhere: people, places, memories.
There is a legitimate concern about wealth distribution in the United States, but the answer is not to scapegoat any individual who makes over $200,000 per year and to try to sell the fraud that the government can equitably take the money of those wh...
I have to have faith that we're going to succeed in transforming where we get our energy from. The big worry is whether or not we're going to do it before it's too late. And I think nobody knows the answer to that.
In the United States, nobody needs to remind people of their own role or their own power in creating the future they want to see. Perhaps it is something that is almost written into your cultural DNA: a desire to answer your Founding Fathers' call to...
I get a lot of responses to my movies. Some people say, 'Oh, I thought it was really funny - I hope that's okay!' And my answer always is 'Yes. It's totally okay.'
Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ASK. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.
My life has been a quest for knowledge and understanding, and I am nowhere near having achieved that. And it doesn't bother me in the least. I will die without having come up with the answers to many things in life.
That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life.
There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect ...
I do not think it possible for anyone to get by in life without prejudice. However, the attempt to do so leads many people to suppose that, in order to decide any moral question, they have to find an indubitable first principle from which they can de...
To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
This was our last stop. This was it. We had those two embryos that we had banked prior to learning about the breast cancer, and with the medicine she was on, this was our last effort. The prayers were answered.
You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can't answer slurs, but I'm here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn't.
