As a kid, I didn't need to be convinced the future promised peril and oppression, so when I started thinking up the middle-grade science fiction novel that became 'The Boy at the End of the World,' it seemed only natural to build the story around a d...
It's only Western civilization that, God forbid, you talk about dying, when it's the only thing we know for certain, right? Everyone's going to die, so what's the big problem? 'Oh, God. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it.' I mean, I'm one of t...
At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won't be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he ...
Words outlive people, institutions, civilizations. Words spur images, associations, memories, inspirations and synapse pulsations. Words send off physical resonations of thought into the nethersphere. Words hurt, soothe, inspire, demean, demand, inci...
For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is ...
Eisenhower was less deferential to the military than he seemed likely to be, Kennedy was not at all beholden to the pope, George W. Bush was smarter than portrayed and Barack Obama has not led a charge from the left - least of all on behalf of the ci...
Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and gov...
We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not - nor will we ever - monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people, including subje...
I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports make me feel like we're about three per cent better than ants. Especially U.S. airports. They're zoos. All civility is gone.
People say 'what do you mean' when you talk about 'bringing down civilization.' What I really mean is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and depriving the powerful of the ability to destroy the planet. That's what I really mean.
Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
The mythic voice rising from literature and art allows us to be humane. We are not humane because of political power, or education, or even religion. We are humane because we recognize the humanity of others. The writer and the artist appeal to that ...
I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never h...
If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century - and surely we do - perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the nineteenth century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it's just b...
We are a generation that is obsessed with nostalgia. Everything from the past is so readily available in ways that it never was before and because of that, western civilization will experience a period of arrested growth. The future holds fifty-year-...
It is our job to work for the government of the day and so that means working for Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, and we need to do those preparations just to be sure that we're ready for whoever you, the British public, elect and that's core to our ...
When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 after a searing, four-year civil war, they immediately instituted laws which fit their utopic vision of the time of Islam's founding more than 1,300 years earlier. Afghan women's lives offered the most visible ...
Waldo Lydecker: My dear, either you were born on a extremely rustic community, where good manners are unknown, or you suffer from a common feminine delusion that the mere fact of being a woman exempts you from the rules of civilized conduct.
Daniel Dravot: Now listen to me you benighted muckers. We're going to teach you soldiering. The world's noblest profession. When we're done with you, you'll be able to slaughter your enemies like civilized men.
[last lines] Spock Prime: [closing monologue] Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life-forms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one...
I've begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check...
