It must be acknowledged that an increasing proportion of the world's population is living in cities, in almost completely human-made environments. But we should also acknowledge that there are still a considerable number of people who wish to live in harmony with nature, and that globalization has made their ways of life increasing difficult to sustain.

She sat one of the fluffy cats in my lap and stuffed the other down my shirt. She turned and left. 'There,' said the large man. 'The kittens will make your sad go away.

We depend for so much on those we love that of course we want them to have desirable personal qualities and to believe that we do too. But if we pin our love for another, and theirs for us, based on personal qualities, it confers an unacceptable conditionality and substitutability on love: we don't want to be exchanged for a better model of whatever our lovers deem to be desirable, so there is a strong tendency to want: to be loved for no reason at all, simply be loved.

I argue for a relational conception of the person as a basis for an environmental ethic that can encourage us to preserve the environment not solely on the basis of satisfying human interests and not solely because we might attribute intrinsic value to the environment, but because the environment is something with which we can potentially enter into constructive relationship, as part of what makes us who we are or transform who we are and open us up to new interests.

War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.

I once saw Arnold Schwarzenegger kill a man in a movie by grabbing his head and twisting it until the neck broke. Was that difficult? Could a man do it without a lot of practice?

And, well, that's my story," I said. "I'm sorry that it's so, you know. Retarded.