When I was 13 or 14, my parents had a bit of a windfall so bought a lovely new kitchen, but I burnt it down. I was making cheese on toast when flames escaped from the grill. My father stopped the fire with blind panic and excessive water. I was forgi...
There is no evidence that the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, read anything that we think of as a New Testament book. I don't see any evidence that he knew what was in the Gospels, or the letters of Paul, which I don't think he woul...
The American soldier is quick in adapting himself to a new mode of living. Outfits which have been here only three days have dug vast networks of ditches three feet deep in the bare brown earth. They have rigged up a light here and there with a stora...
One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which...
The media has changed. We now give broadcast licenses to philosophies instead of people. People get confused and think there is no difference between news and entertainment. People who project themselves as journalists on television don't know the fi...
So, I'm lying on the couch and Laura walks in and I say, 'Free at last,' and she says 'You're free all right, you're free to do the dishes.' So I say, 'You're talking to the former president, baby,' and she said, 'consider this your new domestic poli...
Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves' fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids f...
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the sto...
In the modern world, we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old. Men have not gotten tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired o...
[On school uniforms] Don't these schools do enough damage making all these kids think alike, now they have to make them look alike too? It's not a new idea, either. I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s, but it was hard to understand because...
Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries ...
One thing for me that modeling definitely did was that you go to do a different job every day, and you are working with a completely new team of people. You have to learn how to talk to people and how to creatively achieve the same goals. I think it ...
I think diva is an inevitable outcome of the industry, and I don't think it reflects on the person at all. You take a normal human being, and basically, for 24 hours, seven days a week, apart from sleeping, you introduce them to places and things alm...
For the last several years and culminating in six months in orbit next year, I've been training for my third space flight. This one is almost in a category completely different than the previous two, specifically to live in on the space station for s...
Long dormant feelings poured through my dried-up limbs and wound through me, slowly filling the emptiness. Like an irrigated field, I felt myself blossom and grow with new vigor. He was the sun, and the tenderness he showed me was life-giving water.
Lovelessness is a huge sin in the church. The four primary personalities in the New Testament- Jesus, Paul, Peter, and John- all four of them say that love is the most important thing. But the only time love really counts is when something unlovely h...
Upon the union of the male germ cell with the female egg cell, a new cell is created which almost immediately splits into two parts. One of these grows rapidly, creating the human body of the individual with all its organs, and dies only with the ind...
I grew up in New York City, and both my parents worked. On weekends, we'd go out to the country, and on Sunday nights we'd come back. Sometimes we were a little cranky - it was a long drive. But we could always look forward to one thing: my mother's ...
I guess I'd like to have my cake and eat it, too. I want to be known for having a recognizable style. I believe having your own personal identity is what makes you competitive. On the other hand, I would like to be versatile and be challenged to go i...
When I look back now I realize I was such an obnoxious kid but, you know, I went to schools like you, like a public school in New York so compared to the anarchy that was going on there, they really wouldn't - I wasn't like a bad kid. I saw people co...
Like a tracer running through the veins of the city, networks of air quality sensors attached to bikes can help measure an individual's exposure to pollution and draw a dynamic map of the urban air on a human scale, as in the case of the Copenhagen W...
