I was given a thick paperback copy of the 'Guinness Book of Records' when I was 11 years old, and I read it gluttonously, cover to cover, paying special lip-smacking attention to all the incredibly gruesome chapters about the violence of human histor...
The earliest known writing probably emerged in southern Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, but for most of recorded history, reading and writing remained among the most elite human activities: the province of monarchs, priests and nobles who reserve...
I think the reason for my fascination with craft is what it represents, what it means in our culture, what it means in our history and in humanity. It was the idea that you could go to your butcher to get something, you could go to your tailor to get...
I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects poli...
If our moral attitudes are entirely the result of nonrational factors, such as gut feelings and the absorption of cultural norms, they should either be stable or randomly drift over time, like skirt lengths or the widths of ties. They shouldn't show ...
When I turned 11, my dad decorated a room at the Standard hotel in Los Angeles in a '60s, Austin Powers style. There was human bowling: You run inside a giant inflatable ball and try to knock down pins. To this day, adults say it was one of the crazi...
The priest is Christ's slave, and Christ himself took the form of a slave and became obedient to death. So the priest in serving human needs lives a Godward life, possessed by God and witnessing that only when lives are utterly possessed by God do th...
If you think of life and death on a continuum, finding the point where it tips is complicated. It cuts across all political lines and gets to the root of our humanity. It requires faith informed by years of intimacy that you're doing what's right for...
In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn't not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being's ...
Hatred is corrosive of a person's wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress to freedom and democra...
What might be happening in human beings who experience near death is that they are getting cold, but before they get so cold that they would die, they're actually diminishing their oxygen consumption in a way that is unknown. And that extends their s...
'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these...
I was a witness to lots of death... Saving a human life was something really, really beautiful... no matter who they are. Not only Israeli people owe me their lives. I guarantee many terrorists, many Palestinian leaders, owe me their lives - or in ot...
Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant. I am glad he is now on trial for crimes against humanity. But, opposition to a dictator is not the measure I use when deciding whether to send our men and women in uniform off to war and possible death.
When you have a crime against humanity that is so awesome in scale and death, it is more than permissible to look around and say, who recently has been declaring war on the United States? Of course, the compass points straight to bin Laden.
I think violence, cynicism, brutality and fashion are the staples of our diet. I think in the grand history of story-telling, going back to people sitting around fires, the dark side of human nature has always been very important. Movies are part of ...
Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.
A relationship book I once read told women to use the word 'fun' whenever possible. The author claimed it had a subliminal aphrodisiac effect on men, who want a relaxed girl attached only to good times - the human equivalent of Diet Coke. This is not...
The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work...
The rich are different. Their wants are very high maintenance. They'll pick eye color and hair color, all the way down to what she does for a living, what school she went to. Their list can be extremely long. But at the end of the day, dating is dati...
One of the factors a country's economy depends on is human capital. If you don't provide women with adequate access to healthcare, education and employment, you lose at least half of your potential. So, gender equality and women's empowerment bring h...
