There are things about our world that almost by their nature defy our ability to comprehend them. Some people use a religious register to deal with that - they call it God and that's a way of domesticating it.
They killed my character off and as God would have it, just when they told me I would never work again, I got cast in a little program called Roots, and as they would say, the rest is history.
We make mistakes, we have our faults, and God knows some of us have more than our share, but when danger threatens and duty calls, we go smiling to our own funeral.
The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.
A lot's riding on 'Dune,' and my friends in Seattle realize what's happening if I freak out a bit. They accept whatever I happen to be, and they tell me when I'm slipping out of Kyle. They call me the 'God Emperor of the Universe.'
I strongly support the call to greatly expand our human intelligence capability to penetrate al Qaeda and gather critical intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks on our homeland.
There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge - that is everywhere.
If you are an open-minded and tolerant Muslim, you have enough knowledge to question the moves of a Christian governor or even the Ku Klux Klan. They called themselves a Christian organization, but how is that possible since Jesus didn't do that?
I was a student at Peking University for close to a decade, while a so-called 'knowledge explosion' was rapidly expanding. I was searching for not just knowledge, but also to mold a temperament, to cultivate a scholarly outlook.
I watched my parents in their leadership callings in the Church and the community. We just grew up knowing that we should serve and do whatever we could do to make things grow.
The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
I used to work out on an island called Martha's Vineyard. I ran a pizza oven, I caddied, I worked on a fishing boat, and life is very easy out there. It's a vacation lifestyle all the time.
The gay people I knew in real life were soft spoken and didn't want to call attention to themselves because they were terrified of exposing themselves, of people finding out that they're gay.
Two thousand years ago there was One here on this earth who lived the grandest life that ever has been lived yet - a life that every thinking man, with deeper or shallower meaning, has agreed to call divine.
Ha, well you see... this notion of a balanced life, I don't think I'm ever going to be able to have that... but I can have what I call an integrated life.
I've been a sports fan all my life, and like most other actors, I'm convinced I could have been a pro athlete if Hollywood hadn't come calling.
Around the world today we're seeing an incredible transformation, from what I would call a biocidal species, one that - whether we intentionally or unintentionally - have designed our systems to kill life, a lot of the time.
I think 'Teenage Wasteland' was one of those cult hits like 'My So-Called Life', something that came along and got a lot of viewers and then somehow fell into a bad timeslot that nobody ever watched, and then the network pulled the plug prematurely.
Acting and singing on 'One Tree Hill' was definitely one of the most incredible experiences of my life. I didn't even know I could act until I auditioned at the casting call for the part of Mia.
Also, I had read a book called She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, written by a professor who had gone through transgender surgery, but it took this person well into his thirties to come to terms with the absolute necessity of having to do it.
We are a nation of immigrants. We are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the ones who wanted a better life, the driven ones, the ones who woke up at night hearing that voice telling them that life in that place called America c...
