International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

Edinburgh used to be a haughty city.

Do not take on a traditionally built person unless you are prepared for a heavyweight bout.

To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.

And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.

Everything has been something before.

I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.