I spent my 20s working in patient care at a large university hospital, an experience that has informed all my work and has given me a lot of human observation to draw on.
That's why, to experience that, you know for a fact that a human being is capable of so much more, because to go to that place and to step outside yourself and observe yourself do these things, while the rest of the world is moving in slow motion, is...
When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.
I think being a parent is the most challenging thing you do. That's why we're here. It's at the heart of what it is to be a human being. It's the ultimate experience because it questions everything about who you are. But it's difficult.
Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.
I don't want to go slumming in somebody else's pain just to write a book. I want to go into those darker places to shine a light on that experience and come out with a story that validates the human spirit.
Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one's identity as a being of worth and dignity.
Most of our history in space has been communicated in terms of action - what people do, a chronological list of events which have transpired - as opposed to the human experience of having done those things.
Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.
I think I'm very interested in people, in the way our minds work and how we navigate through the experience that is life. Very interested in people's struggles and their choices and their regrets and joys. I'm very interested in the human animal.
The value of the beans for oil production, as well as for human food, has become recognized so quickly and so generally during the past year that the crop has acquired a commercial standing far in excess of its previous status.
Diarrhea, 90 percent of which is caused by food and water contaminated by excrement, kills a child every fifteen seconds. That's more than AIDS, malaria, or measles, combined. Human feces are an impressive weapon of mass destruction.
Basically I'm a female human being with brown hair, enjoy precision, reading the news, eating delicious food with my delicious friends and laughing at ridiculous things that don't translate while you are desperately trying to make them.
I love weird science. I learned in an article in 'National Geographic' that there are trillions of bacteria in our guts that help us digest food. These are non-human creatures.
Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.
Since Castro took power, the Cuban people have been denied basic human freedoms. No freedom of religion, no freedom of the press, no political freedom. And the regime uses brutality and violence to suppress these freedoms and impose its will.
Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.
I certainly enjoy going on stage and lecturing and talking to Congress. That's a personality explanation. And given government proposals, I thought I had a clear view that they were antagonistic to human freedom.
You can't legislate into existence an act of forgiveness and a true confession; those are mysteries of the human heart, and they occur between one individual and another individual, not a panel of judges sitting asking questions, trying to test your ...
Religion and gods and beliefs - for me, it all comes down to your brother. And your brother might be the brother in your family, or it might be the guy next to you in the foxhole - it's about human connections.
The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better.