Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good had been aptly described as that at which everything aims.
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.
In votes cast, Latinos have increased to five million in the 1996 Presidential election, up from two million in the 1976 election. The number of Hispanic elected officials has not risen so fast.
The IRS targeting certain groups for harassment because of their politics would be unfair. If we found out the NSA was keeping special tabs on everyone who worshiped at a mosque or took a Bible trip through the Middle East, you'd have an uprising.
We read too much Shakespeare at school, and view our parliamentary politics as dynastic drama, in which an impatient crown prince frets at his long subordination and begins to scheme for the throne he knows he merits, was promised and has earned.
To cover politics in Washington allows you to live in the very, very wide gap between what the actual truth is, and how people are trying to manipulate the truth. They speak in the language of spin, obsequiousness, obfuscation. The meta of politics i...
Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views - on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics - than Robert Heinlein.
It's a problem for him because he's got - like Edward VII had - nearly all his lifetime to wait until he becomes Monarch. What is he going to do with it? So he wants to do something positive but he always courts those dangers.
There's a magical energy and power from the ocean. I was born in a room overlooking the sea, in the middle of a storm. Perhaps, then, it's not surprising that shores touch my soul. Science might disagree, but I think there's a difference in the air o...
There's a lot of peer pressure to not do positive stories out of Iraq... I think there's a sense that the administration got a pass during the hot days of war and now that the war is over it's time to even out the deck somewhat.
Rolf Ekeus, his appearance can deceive. He looks somewhere between an international diplomat and a mad professor. He's got that sort of shock of white hair and a slightly absent-minded way of speaking. But he's extremely sharp and very serious about ...
It was necessary to bluff the Japanese camp commanders, with whatever authority I could muster, that I had come officially to ensure that the surrender terms were being complied with and that living conditions for the POWs were being immediately impr...
When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around and for 25 and perhaps 30 square miles you can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.
A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes the stimulus can be an idea, which will rapidly clothe itself in character and incident. 'Foreign Bodies' came about through the contemplatio...
So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-V...
Notionally a left-wing movement, the Anti-Germans were born after the collapse of the Berlin wall. While most Germans rejoiced at the end of the Cold War, the Anti-Germans feared that a united Germany might lead to a fourth Reich - and a return of an...
After its defeat in the Second World War, Japan, unlike Germany, failed to show true contrition or give a fulsome apology, though it showered its neighbours, including China, with generous economic assistance. Only in 1995 did it finally offer an apo...
Hitler had a police state of the first order. And those who showed any sign of being weak-kneed faced prison or often summary execution. That prevented a lot of people who knew that the war was not going to turn out well for Germany from giving up.
The United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up after Saddam Hussein's army was driven out of Kuwait. Washington assumed Saddam was weak after losing the 1991 Gulf War. Iraqis rose up, but Saddam's troops killed thousands - Iraqis say tens of thousand...
So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.
People were consuming on average less calories after the war than during the war. Things were still very tough. If you look at the film footage of London streets, even in areas which weren't slums, there are kids in the streets who are dirty and have...
