One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this.
I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.
I take the world very personally. I take history personally; I want to place myself in the larger context.
The history of storytelling isn't one of simply entertaining the masses but of also advising, instructing, challenging the status quo.
It's hard to be a son of a candidate. It's hard to be a brother of a candidate. I think it may be the hardest thing to be the dad of the candidate.
The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.
Making money is a happiness. And that's a great incentive. Making other people happy is a super-happiness.
I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity.
I'm a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I've been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.
Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity.
Unless your government is respectable, foreigners will invade your rights; and to maintain tranquillity, it must be respectable - even to observe neutrality, you must have a strong government.
Fear and greed are potent motivators. When both of these forces push in the same direction, virtually no human being can resist.
Fear, greed and hope have destroyed more portfolio value than any recession or depression we have ever been through.
Roosevelt talked not only about Freedom from Fear, but also Freedom from Want.
How many writers in history have ever been as famous as Stephen King? He casts an awfully long shadow.
Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.
There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past.
I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.
It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.
Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.
When I meet people on airplanes and they find out I'm an economist, they usually ask about stock tips.
