One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.
Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?
When I first was exposed to Buddhism in the mid-1960s, I said it was so practical and utterly pragmatic. That's what attracted me to Buddhism.
At a moderate calculation, among a million of persons inhabiting the metropolis, there are, at least, twenty-five thousand children who attend these schools, and cost their parents as many pounds sterling, per annum.
A spirit, breathing the language of independence, is natural to Englishmen, few of whom are disposed to brook compulsion, or submit to the dictates of others, when not softened by reason, or tempered with kindness.
The sincere teachers of their youth should be met, not with an intention to dictate to them, but to give additional force to their well-meant endeavours, and raise them to public esteem.
Where there's water on Earth, you find life as we know it. So if you find water somewhere else, it becomes a remarkable draw to look closer to see if life of any kind is there, even if it's bacterial, which would be extraordinary for the field of bio...
Christlike communications are expressed in tones of love rather than loudness. They are intended to be helpful rather than hurtful. They tend to bind us together rather than to drive us apart. They tend to build rather than to belittle.
The fact that I don't have any particular need for religion doesn't mean that I have a need to cast religion aside the way some of my colleagues do.
We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think religion stops people from thinking. I think it justified crazies.
I envy those Hindus and Buddhists who have in their religion philosophy and ancestor worship which build in the believer a continuity with the past, and that most important ingredient in the building of a nation - memory.
The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.
Every fundamentalist movement I've studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.
Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.
Just in our lifetime our society has become looser and more private, it becomes extremely difficult to hold to any permanent commitment whatever, least of all to organized religion.
Do not imagine that what we have said of the insufficiency of our understanding and of its limited extent is an assertion founded only on the Bible: for philosophers likewise assert the same, and perfectly understand it,- without having regard to any...
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
Last week I did a piece for Style on advice to Laura Bush about how to help her husband. This week it's religion. It just depends on what I find interesting at the moment.
In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that is, the sacred lore of priests and people... and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual.
My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright ...
I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don't consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.
