If you go to Norway, Finland, Russia or Australia, you'll see Xerox or Fuji-Xerox people, not just the name on the door. We have human beings who live and work and serve customers everywhere around the globe.
Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.
I think the most important thing people can do to save our planet and the human race is to empower women!
Americans, we passionately believe, are a humane people. We showed that in restoring wounded economies abroad after World War II, even those of our enemies, Germany and Japan.
We can no longer afford the war in Iraq. Our financial costs have already passed a third of a trillion dollars; the lifetime costs for this war, in both human and economic terms, will be borne by Americans for generations to come.
It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash.
I often think of it this way: The 21st century is going to be a war on the attention of humanity. Where civilization focuses its attention, I mean, that's what defines what the civilization cares about.
Industry has operated against the artisan in favor of the idler, and also in favor of capital and against labor. Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war.
One could reasonably argue that the Turkish pogrom against the Armenians during World War I qualifies as a crime against humanity, as does the United States' ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.
The only other human endeavor on which there's more 16-millimeter film than pro football is World War II, and we're going to pass that in 2013.
The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.
No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don't allow our bodies to heal, and we don't allow our minds and hearts to heal.
In a society so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have imposed on the rest of life contains ...
[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone...
Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little ch...
[Dinner in the officers' mess. The captain is inebriated, but asks apparently seriously] Capt. Jack Aubrey: Do you see those two weevils doctor? Dr. Stephen Maturin: I do. Capt. Jack Aubrey: Which would you choose? Dr. Stephen Maturin: [sighs annoyed...
Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shap...
We are aberrations—beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation, horrors that poison the world by sowing our madness everywhere we go, glutting dayligh...
The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity ...
The bistro was his secret weapon in tracking down murderers. Not just in Three Pines, but in every town and village in Quebec. First he found a comfortable café or brasserie, or bistro, then he found the murderer. Because Armand Gamache knew somethi...
