In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
If something comes that it is so extreme that you have difficulty thinking of it as a good thing, don't think of it as a good thing and kid yourself. To the extent that you can, don't label it a bad thing. Refusing to label something a bad thing open...
What is important is not getting intoxicated with a good feeling or getting intoxicated even with an insight. These take many forms in our practice. We go through times of great release, where there has been physical holding for what feels like forev...
People think that women don't negotiate because they're not good negotiators, but that's not it. Women don't negotiate because it doesn't work as well for them. Women have to say, 'I really add a lot of value, and it's in your interest to pay me more...
I went out to the desert where Cleopatra camped out with her mercenary army. It's a desolate outpost. Nothing has changed since her day. You realize how far she had to travel. Not only is it a good 150 miles against the current, you can't take a ship...
I was very pleased that the positive things about me and my game outshone the aggressive style of play I use. I would never tone that down, because I believe in that style of play, and I believe that you can play rough on the court and still be a goo...
People who hardly ever cook at all, suddenly at the holidays, feel like it's their responsibility to not only cook dinner for large groups of people suddenly, but to serve things that are fussy or fancy or formal. And I don't think that's what anybod...
I can be the most skilled person in the world, but if everyone else at my firm lacks skills, my employer is going to find it more difficult to introduce new technology, new production techniques. So as a result, my employer is going to be less produc...
For many people, and particularly in communities of color, the basic bargain of America - that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can share in the nation's prosperity - has become a raw deal. That's what President Obama's opportunity agenda ...
It seems always to have been difficult to have been a New York Philharmonic conductor because of the nature of New York. We are in direct competition with the great orchestras in the world who come to play in our hall or in Carnegie, and we are const...
If the American government can't stand behind the dollar, the world's benchmark currency, then the global financial system will very likely enter a new era in which there is much less trade and much less economic growth. It would be, by most accounts...
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate sp...
Social Security got passed because John D. Rockefeller was sick of having to take money out of his profits to pay for his workers' pension funds. Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers?
Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and ac...
When the Soviet Union fell, optimistic scholars believed the world had shifted inexorably in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Instead, the West gradually embraced bigger government and weaker social bonds, creating a fragmented so...
The bottom line is there are lots of problems that were not created by government. The biggest one is loss of middle class incomes, loss of good-paying jobs which was created by technology and globalization. Above all, when you can move a job to Chin...
The tenth amendment said the federal government is supposed to only have powers that were explicitly given in the Constitution. I think the federal government's gone way beyond that. The Constitution never said that you could have a Federal Reserve t...
As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be ...
I've spent a great deal of time over the past decade as a caregiver for various family members. It gives me a perspective on the struggles that many New Yorkers face with illness, disability, health care, insurance difficulties, and trying to work wi...
Advances in technology - hugely beneficial though they are - render us vulnerable in new ways. For instance, our interconnected world depends on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delive...
The war we are fighting today against terrorism is a multifaceted fight. We have to use every tool in our toolkit to wage this war - diplomacy, finance, intelligence, law enforcement, and of course, military power - and we are developing new tools as...
