Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned s...
I am really a loner after all; I am really not a social person. Because of my job, people think I am out every night, but I really hate all that. I am somebody who likes to be alone and see some close friends. I am a shy and introspective person.
'Savage Inequalities' was about school finance, and 'Amazing Grace' primarily dealt with medical and social injustices in New York. But with 'Ordinary Resurrections,' I had no predetermined agenda. When I met with the children, I was not in pursuit o...
For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he ...
Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn't have science or art. Al...
I collect collectivisms. I’ve already got socialism and communism, and all I need is fascism to complete the set. I’m looking to trade my dusty democracy, but Uncle Sam isn’t interested in a deal at this time.
Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn't make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history.
When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.
A nation which fails to adequately remember salient points of its own history, is like a person with Alzheimer's. And that can be a social disease of a most destructive nature.
Scholars and enlightened always want to define the differences between communism, socialism, fascism and other economic or political systems. It really doesn't matter to those who are subjected to those societies how someone has articulated their mis...
In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those in...
The word 'Indonesia' was first manufactured in 1850 in the form 'Indu-nesians' by the English traveler and social observer George Samuel Windsor Earl. He was searching for an ethnographic term to describe 'that branch of the Polynesian race inhabitin...
Among peoples who possess a highly developed pugnacious instinct we find the greatest progress in the arts, sciences, social and political organization, commerce and industry. The instinct takes the milder form of rivalry which is the motive force of...
METAPHOR: A tightly fitting suit of metal, generally tin, which entirely encloses the wearer, both impeding free movement and preventing emotional expression and/or social contact.
The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As...
Faith can be stirred within the walls of church buildings, but faith is formed and nourished in the waiting rooms of hospitals, helplessly witnessing a thirty-one-year-old sister suffer, holding kids affected by the AIDS epidemic, and being stretched...
I felt accepted for who I was. I didn't have to sort the words in my head first, making sure they were socially acceptable before I said them. I groped around for a word that fit. Peace. I felt peaceful.
How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do as we please. It doesn't require the breakdown of a social order. It takes a six-hour plane flight.
We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.
Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reforms. He was not yet preaching monotheism; he was demanding economic justice.
The purpose of this pamphlet is to explain how local currencies work. Alone they cannot solve all the multiple financial, social and environmental crises we face, but they are an increasingly important part of the answer.
