What makes anyone think that government officials are even trying to protect us? A government is not analogous to a hired security guard. Governments do not come into existence as social service organizations or as private firms seeking to please con...
Fairytales teach children that the world is fraught with danger, including life-threatening danger; but by being clever (always), honest (as a rule, but with common-sense exceptions), courteous (especially to the elderly, no matter their apparent soc...
There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move...
What is boredom? Endless repetitions, like, for example, Navidson’s corridors and rooms, which are consistently devoid of any Myst-like discoveries thus causing us to lose interest. What then makes anything exciting? Or better yet: what is exciting...
Academic historians of the last hundred years or so get all stiff and tweedy when you suggest that people will go to all ends for the sake of their religion. They'll assure you that religion is just a cover for other, more "rational" motivations. The...
I can't blame most people if they don't read a lot. Because they have their own preferences. If they find an article long, they won't even finish. So as to say, I am glad I have the love for "reading" for it nourishes your soul and yourself from idea...
Do you prefer fermented or distilled? This is a trick question. It doesn’t matter how much you like wine, because wine is social and writing is anti-social. This is a writer’s interview, writing is a lonely job, and spirits are the lubricant of t...
But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a Go...
When I was a kid--10, 11, 12, 13--the thing I wanted most in the world was a best friend. I wanted to be important to people; to have people that understood me. I wanted to just be close to somebody. And back then, a thought would go through my head ...
I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, bo...
Hey, bodyguard. You better get down to the gymnasium. This jumbo pixie guy is killing your sister." "Really?" said Butler, unconvinced. "Really. Juliet just does not seem to be herself. She can't put two moves together. It's pathetic, really. Everybo...
(Popular singer Eddie Fisher, appearing on This is Show Business, told Kaufman that women refused to date him because he looked so young.) Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars up to twenty-four time...
With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but at home. A curious condition of a repu...
After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shell-shocked fragments the previous day had left him with. He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a li...
Janet: [talking to Brian's camera] Brian, it's you! Hi. I'm gonna try not to wake you up. I can't believe that I stayed over. [pulls gun from holster] Janet: This, this is interesting. I have never shot one before. Maybe that could be our next date. ...
[last lines] Edward R. Murrow: To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention...
[first lines] Stevens: You're... from Baker? [Angel Eyes is silent, eating a bowl of stew and staring at him] Stevens: Tell Baker that I told him all that I know already and I want to live in peace, understand? That it's no use to go on tormenting me...
Smaug: You seem familiar with my name, but I don't remember smelling your kind before. Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask? Bilbo Baggins: I come from under the hill... Smaug: Underhill? Bilbo Baggins: ...and under hills and over hills ...
Dan: Time... you can't see it, you can hear it, you can't weigh it, you can't... measure it in a laboratory. It is a subjective sense of... becoming, what we... are, in stead of what we were a nanosecond ago, becoming what we will be in another nanos...
Dan: Wouldn't you have some relic, an artifact, to remind you of your earlier life? Like this maybe. [holding up bone tool] John Oldman: Thrift shop. Really. John Oldman: [lecturing now] If you lived a hundred, a thousand years, would you still have ...
Royal: First thing I want to do is take you out to see your grandmother, at some point. Richie: I haven't been out there since I was 6. Margot: I haven't been out there at all, I was never invited. Royal: Well, she wasn't your real grandmother, and I...
