To hear a truth, we must first suspect that our present truth might not be. Like Alice’s White Queen, who often believed six impossible things before breakfast, I believed many things in my life, considering them to be true at any given time but su...
This isn't television! This isn't a movie! Giles and Buffy aren't gonna appear and show us how to deal with our wonderful new powers! Some fricking owl isn't gonna come sailing in through your window from Hogwarts! There's no Dumbledore! The Cullens ...
And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it, Heaven." Washington himself could be a hard driving businessman, yet he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason, he thought it t...
It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to scienc...
Well, suppose we use our brains. We see things solid. Solidities are important to us in nature. In solidities, there are measures that greatly affect us. There are rhythms in the ins and outs of form. Music, the forest and to many the most impressive...
Planning. Short-term memory. Attention. At first glance, these three frontal lobe functions can seem like diverse activities that just happen to be packed into the same brain region. But on closer inspection it turns out that they are facets of the s...
Hope is something that is demanded of us; it is not, then, a mere reasoned calculation of our chances. Nor is it merely the bubbling up of a sanguine temperament; if it is demanded of us, it lies not in the temperament but in the will... Hoping for w...
States' rights, as our forefathers conceived it, was a protection of the right of the individual citizen. Those who preach most frequently about states' rights today are not seeking the protection of the individual citizen, but his exploitation. . . ...
[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for...
It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; becaus...
The problem I want to talk to you about tonight is the problem of belief. What does it mean to believe? We use this word all the time, and I think behind it lurk some really extraordinary taboos and confusions. What I want to argue tonight is that ho...
Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psy...
History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By r...
It seems the older we get, the tighter our inner circle becomes. When life has you down, some of those you thought had your back run, others...sometimes strangers surprise you and fill that empty space up. Oh, but life has a great balancing act and w...
Our way of life decrees that everyone is born with a pre-determined destiny. With good karma, one can try to make the most of one’s circumstances. But that’s all. There is a lot that is beyond the power of mere humans, ; the future unfolds the wa...
If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently....
And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light- or lack of it- what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear before us, a green and gibbering banshee whose purpose was to drive us back the way we had come before we...
He's dead?' Vera asked. 'He's dead? Johnny's dead?' He covered the mouthpiece. 'No,' he said. 'Not dead.' 'Not dead! Not dead!' she cried, and fell on her knees in the phone nook with an audible thud. 'O God we most heartily thank Thee and ask that Y...
Fiction may be about lying – on the surface, anyway – but fiction is about hiding the truth behind those lies. It's about using those lies to say something true and real. It's about showing the reader something. It's about making them feel. And h...
Crying is NOT a weakness. Cry as much as you have to. Don’t be afraid or ashamed to let your tears flow. Crying is a natural part of life. We all have feelings, and sometimes crying is all that we can do. Crying can help relieve the pain, hurt, dis...
Whether we are at Cafe Gratitude or Carl’s Jr, whether we are in a cathedral or in a nightclub, whether we are inside of a mosque or on the metro, every single moment is a sacred moment. A moment far too important for us to miss. When we miss the p...
