Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another h...
A lot of things that we cannot buy and sell in markets used to be totally legal objects of market exchange - human beings when we had slavery, child labour, human organs, and so on. So there is no economic theory that actually says that you shouldn't...
Legal documents have mistrust written all over them. It's unfortunate, but the human DNA is so tuned to kind of taking you for granted that we tend to protect ourselves legally. That's why I don't read them as, if I read them, I will go soft. To me, ...
Behavior is mutable. It changes from place to place. It's like accents, dialect - it varies from one area to another. But there are universal truths about what it means to be a human being. All the other stuff is like applique. Learning that was inte...
If the bringing of children into the world is today an economic burden, it is because the social system is inadequate; and not because God’s law is wrong. Therefore the State should remove the causes of that burden. The human must not be limited an...
[...] nobody anywhere seemed to be willing to ponder for a moment the possibility that a human being who refused to participate, who refused to speak or listen, who failed to ‘interact with his peer group‘, might not be all that crazy, and might ...
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...
The (children's) book is a specimen of the most scandalous escapism: it paints a happiness under incompatible conditions – the sort of freedom we can have only in childhood and the sort we can have only in maturity – and conceals the contradictio...
You know, I live a monastic lifestyle. No, I do. I do live in extremes, basically. I go back and forth. Once every six months, I'll have a day where I eat more chocolate than has ever been consumed by a human being.
I saw the horrible way that people could treat each other. That may be the saddest thing of all. I saw greed and anger and murder and a total lack of concern for human life. It was a wicked side of the human soul that I saw... and it saddened me to k...
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 ...
Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying t...
When I've written episodes of 'Doctor Who', when it comes to the monster chasing somebody, it's the Doctor and the companion, running down the corridor, being chased by a guy with a stick and a tennis ball on the end. Whereas, when I see the rushes o...
Now in its third year in office, the Obama Administration has never championed the cause of human rights. Its slow reaction in June 2009 to the stealing of the election in Iran and the birth of the 'Green Movement' there, and its delay in backing the...
Well, this is an unfortunate part of the UN institution. It's the - the theater of the absurd. It doesn't only cast Israel as the villain; it often casts real villains in leading roles: Gadhafi's Libya chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights; Sadda...
We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.
Because each work of art originates in the mind and feelings of a human being, it reaches its destination in the mind and feelings of another. A work of art, therefore, is a fact of consciousness quite as much as it is an object existing beside us in...
We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hamper...
If we look for human frailty in humans, we will always find it. When we focus on finding the frailties of those who hold priesthood keys, we run risks for ourselves. When we speak or write to others of such frailties, we put them at risk.
The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents' abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodi...
Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing,...
