I used to know Brian Howard well -- a dazzling young man to my innocent eyes. In later life he became very dangerous -- constantly attacking people with his fists in public places -- so I kept clear of him. He was consumptive but the immediate cause ...
Establishing a style is important, it really is, but a lot of singers get so involved with their instrument, and more so than they do in what they're singing. I think you really have to think about what you're singing. You have to make the public bel...
The whole student loan thing drives me completely nuts. If it wasn't possible for 18-year-olds to sign themselves up for tens of thousands of dollars in debt in order to pay their college bills, the state governments wouldn't have found it so politic...
Gun control impinges upon the Second Amendment; involuntary commitment impinges upon the liberty clause of the Fifth Amendment; curbing 'entertainment' violence impinges upon First Amendment free speech. That's a lot of impingement, a lot of amendmen...
If they understand, which I believe they really are sensing, that the alternative the Republicans have been offering is to repeal what we've done, to go back to Bush policies - and if you asked the public what would you prefer, Bush economic policies...
I think being raised by a single mother put me on the outside, and I would watch my mother's married friends and think, 'Why does she put him down in public?' or, 'Why is he so rude to her?' It seemed to me that there were very few marriages where th...
Since we replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973, our nation has been making decisions about wars without worry over who fights them. I sincerely believe that reinstating the draft would compel the American public t...
I find with television, you have to play personality, whereas onstage, everyone talks about 'the character,' and what you do. It's a very different thing, because stage is much bigger, but on television, for things to come across to the public, I thi...
I do revel slightly in the fact that I am what I am - an English, middle-class, public-school-educated bloke. There is a reputation with that of being slightly stiff, but whoever gets to know me will see some other element - whether it be vulnerable ...
Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people'--affect the making and quality of mos...
To allow public access to orbit, we would need breakthroughs that would lower the cost by a lot more than an order of magnitude and increase safety by a factor of 100 as compared to every launch system used since the first manned space flight. I thin...
My parents sent me from Venezuela to the Convent of Our Lady, a boarding school in Hastings, which was horrible - like Harry Potter without the magic. Sometimes we went into town, and if we were caught chewing gum in our uniform, members of the publi...
I'm not an academic; I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a writer, communicating ideas to the public. There is a model of how the past is, and a lot of academic archaeology is about refining the model. It's not about changing the model radically. I'm not a...
When I came out publicly, some photo editors had a field day searching for pictures of me with a limp wrist or some other stereotypical gay signifier - as though, after decades in the public eye, they'd suddenly come across a trove of shots where I l...
Fact is, awards shows were never really about recognizing achievement. They were a publicity ploy cooked up in the late 1920s by MGM topper Louie Mayer and his newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which was itself, back in the day...
If we could honestly promise young couples that we knew how to give them offspring with superior character, why should we assume they would decline? Common sense tells us that if scientists find ways to greatly improve human capabilities, there will ...
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded… in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must als...
But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole ...
At town meetings, you can see the shy folks, the ones who have trouble sounding off in public, leaning against the back wall or bending over their knitting. On talk radio, those people are invisible, but they're there. It's a mistake to think that th...
I went from being a senator, a young senator, to being considered for vice president, running for president, being a vice presidential candidate, and becoming a national public figure. All of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that lead...
When politicians began to see that every last thing that they did in public could be broadcast to a mass audience, the fact that the stakes were so much higher now that every moment became fraught caused them to become more cautious, and the consulta...
