Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem.
It has been said that love is a function of communication. I believe that to be true. I believe, by extension, that human understanding is a function of communication. And the better human beings understand one another, the higher the level of functi...
I have seen that technology has contributed to improved communication, that it's contributed to better health care, that it's contributed to better food supplies, that it has contributed to all the basic human needs.
Since the global economic crisis began, the change in global attitudes is clear to see - and I think it is pitiful. Barack Obama came to China and he is probably the only president of the United States never to mention the words 'human rights' in pub...
We are running ourselves into a damaged earth. But I am optimistic. I believe that we can change; we must change. As a human race, we are very young and quite primitive. The sooner we learn the greatness of humanity the better off we will all be.
What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
Gabriel Byrne is an extraordinary human being. We have two extraordinary kids and we work at it. We were always friends. He stuck by me through very hard times, and I hope he'd say the same about me.
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed...
We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can have babies without sex. This is the first time in human history that has been true, and it means, for example, we could do some extraordinary thi...
The most frightening pages of history are those which reveal how easily conditions making a desert of the human spirit may come into existence, with the oozings away of incentive and kindliness in our natural social structure.
Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the unive...
I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out.
I think humans have always wrestled with the Divine Idea - an idea that unites and separates, creates and destroys, consoles and terrifies. Throughout human history, it is an idea that seems sometimes to have caused whole populations to rise up and s...
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize w...
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
A human being is still more likely to die of a bee sting, snake bite or, Lord knows, automobile accident than by shark attack. We do not execute the perpretrators of death by car. We should not butcher an animal for an inadvertent homicide.
Religious symbols should be visible in public space, in a dignified and non-provocative manner. Christmas trees here, Jewish menorahs there and, further along, a minaret - these symbols represent human life in all its diversity.
I do not see how a people that can find in its conscience any excuse whatever for slowly burning to death a human being, or for tolerating such an act, can be entrusted with the salvation of a race.
I believe all life has value, from conception to natural death. And I believe the intentional taking of human life, except to save lives, should be a capital offense, as it is in most states in America today.
The song 'What Goes Up' was inspired as I was playing the piano and reminiscing about the Spaceship One launches I witnessed in the Mojave desert. It is an awesome thing to comprehend the magnitude of what a human being dreams and imagines can be rea...
Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world wo...
