Most of the Amazon basin is as flat as a pancake and laced with extravagantly meandering waterways. One school of thought holds that more than 145 million years ago, when Africa and South America were joined, the Amazon's main stem was connected to t...
Not a day goes by where I'm not reminded of Gollum by some person in the street who asks me to do his voice or wants to talk to me about him. But because 'The Hobbit' has been talked about as a project for many years, I knew that at some point I'd ha...
As long as I live, I will never forget that day 21 years ago when I raised my hand and took the oath of citizenship. Do you know how proud I was? I was so proud that I walked around with an American flag around my shoulders all day long.
Television is much more complex, brain-challenging and involved than it used to be. It's almost impossible to watch a television show from 15 years ago; it's just too boring. I think modern television shows, with their intricate plots, are stimulatin...
At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was...
But when I look at the fact that today is 1,000 days that we have not had a budget for the United States of America, you know, the House, one of the things we did, we passed a budget last year. But that is still sitting over there at the Senate. And ...
I think Michael Crawford realised, I think we all realised, once we'd gone the route of casting a very young girl, you can't really cast a 65 year old man opposite. Slightly different resonance I think. No, we weren't going to go there. We'd have Jac...
To send humans back to the moon would not be advancing. It would be more than 50 years after the first moon landing when we got there, and we'd probably be welcomed by the Chinese. But we should return to the moon without astronauts and build, with r...
You look at the pillars of the state: politics, the media, police, lawyers - they've all got their formal role, and then nestling above that is that power elite who are networked in through soft, social links, that are actually running the show. Why ...
A couple of years before he died, I kissed my father goodbye. He said, 'Son, you haven't kissed me since you were a little boy.' It went straight to my heart, and I kissed him whenever I saw him after that, and my sons and I always kiss whenever we m...
We arrived and the miracle happened. It was the sea and the wind in the bells. We came from far, from years Thirsty as dust, from humble fishermen’s nets on barren shore." ~ José Manuel Cardona, from Poems to Circe, The Birnam Wood (El Bosque de B...
We rode through a three-thousand-year-old country, saw the ruined capital of the Queen of Sheba and the underground red-rock city of Lalibela, fraternized with a tribe of leaden-skinned troglogytes living among the mountains, scrapped with brigands, ...
Like its Senate counterpart, H.R. 1908 is the product of years of bipartisan collaboration. And now, by passing S. 1145, the U.S. Senate has a similar opportunity to restore our patent regime to its rightful position of protecting inventors' property...
The views of the Courts in regard to imprisonment have however undergone modification in the last ten years. Imprisonment is seen more and more as a harsh and drastic punishment to be reserved for callous and impenitent characters. We wish to adopt a...
now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perha...
When you're 11 or 12 years old, you can get so swept up in a book that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality. I think when you have a giant crush when you're in fifth grade, it becomes your whole world. It's like being underwater; everythi...
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him ...
I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head. They were done, skilfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a ...
In my first year, when I was driving in runs, winning games and making headlines, there was an old man who came to games at Seals Stadium, and one day he called me over, introduced himself and told me not to believe anything written about me or think...
I go on a hunting safari at least once a year to Botswana, which is fantastic because we have a huge area of wilderness entirely to ourselves. My island covers roughly 55 acres, which again I have to myself, with nearly half a kilometre of private be...
I have sometimes thought of the final cause of dogs having such short lives and I am quite satisfied it is in compassion to the human race; for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance of ten or twelve years, what would it be if the...
