Fear is an underrated emotion. And that's why I think it's very dangerous to try and cosset children from it. A healthy scare is as good as as a healthy laugh. In fact, they're two sides of the same coin. There is a desire to shield from the knocks a...
My mother always, always, always thought that I was going to be famous. Thought that I was going to win Oscars. In fact, I believe I accepted the Oscar as a ketchup bottle many a time in front of my mother in the kitchen. 'I'd like to thank the Acade...
People tend to overlook the fact that North Korea's economy collapsed at about the same time as South Koreans lost faith in their own state. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time when South Koreans were questioning the very legitimacy of their r...
Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls forth faith rather than reas...
Sin, also for those who don't have faith, exists when one goes against one's conscience. To listen to and obey it means, in fact, to decide in face of what is perceived as good or evil. And on this decision pivots the goodness or malice of our action...
Allowing suspects to indefinitely linger in our cells is, in fact, detrimental to our national security goals. If a suspect is proven to be a terrorist, for the sake of the victims and deterring any future attacks, he or she must be brought to justic...
As a matter of fact, when compression technology came along, we thought the future in 1996 was about voice. We got it wrong. It is about voice, video, and data, and that is what we have today on these cell phones.
The particular aspect of time that I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, lik...
In writing my historical novels, I have to rely upon my imagination to a great extent. I think of it as 'filling in the blanks.' Medieval chroniclers could be callously indifferent to the needs of future novelists. But I think there is a great differ...
In the film world, and I know this from just talking to other people, that I'm known as a kind of dramatic, serious, almost humorless actor, and the fact is I'm a funny guy, and I spend most of my life trying to find a lighter side of things and on s...
And regardless of the fact that in this country, certainly in the arts, we treat comedy as a second-class citizen, I've never thought of it that way. I've always thought it to be important. The last time I looked, the Greeks were holding up two masks...
I never liked apples. In fact, when I was a little girl, my mom wanted to give me apples in my lunch box and I would ask for green peppers. So bizarre... It's funny - I don't have an apple a day, but I can say that I have a few a week.
What's funny is that the idea of popularity - even the use of the word 'popular' - is something that had been mostly absent from my life since junior high. In fact, the hallmark of life after junior high seemed to be the shedding of popularity as a c...
I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do?...
The trick is: how do you talk about natural selection without implying the rigidity of law? We use it as almost an active participant, almost like a god. In fact, you could substitute the word 'god' for 'natural selection' in a lot of evolutionary wr...
God has equipped you to handle difficult things. In fact, He has already planted the seeds of discipline and self-control inside you. You just have to water those seeds with His Word to make them grow!
And I do - make no mistake, I am a Christian and I believe in God, and I don't believe he makes mistakes. So I don't believe that being gay is not a sin, and in fact it's how you're made.
The wrongful arrest of tens of thousands of British Muslims after the September 11 attacks can be explained by the very poor intelligence the police had, and, just possibly, excused by the fact that a terrorist action in Britain linked to British Mus...
Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame are not normal, everyday malware, of course. All three of them were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered. The fact that the malware evaded dete...
The fact that we can't easily foresee clues that would betray an intelligence a million millennia farther down the road suggests that we're like ants trying to discover humans. Ask yourself: Would ants ever recognize houses, cars, or fire hydrants as...
I am a lover of truth; and if you think of truth as being multifaceted and so huge that we human beings can't fully comprehend it, then obviously it makes sense to put all the facts together - to compare disciplines and try to advance the sum of know...