I stayed in Baghdad every summer until I was 14. My dad's sister is still there, but many of my relatives have managed to get out. People forget that there are still people there who are not radicalized in any particular direction, trying to live normal lives in a very difficult situation.

The death of Pope John Paul II led many of different faiths and of no faith to acknowledge their debt to the Roman Catholic Church for holding on to absolutes that the rest of us can measure ourselves against.

Suzanne Fields

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.

Haruki Murakami

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the People, who have... a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers. There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free 'government' ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among people.

John Adams

The journey is the reward.

Chinese Proverb

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Abba Eban

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.

Albert SzentGyorgyi

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,I stand and look at them long and long.They do not sweat and whine about their condition,They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Walt Whitman

Smelling isn't everything said the Elephant. Why, said the Bulldog, if a fellow can't trust his nose, what is he to trust? Well, his brains perhaps, she replied mildly.

C.S. Lewis

I've had to deal, a lot, with my own sense of intimidation at meeting famous people - especially actors, but really any famous people.

Charlie Kaufman

Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's children.

Phillips Brooks

I love Beethoven, especially the poems.

Ringo Starr

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.

E. J. Hobsbawm