We ought to be keeping in mind that the technology is not just hardware and machinery, it is also software. So you can think of languages of the technology and writing of the technology and the social justice of the technology in what social justice does is reduce impacts on the Earth because the most impact is from the poorest and richest people.

How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?

But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

It is always the teacher who must learn the most... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

The Quran says nothing about the veil, except for an injunction to veil the bosom, which is obvious. As for the face, Muhammad's wife Khadijeh never wore the veil, nor did the other wives of the Prophet after Khadijeh died. [...] The ulema have twisted the Quran with their hadith, always twisting it toward those in power, until the message Muhammad laid out so clearly, straight from God, has been reversed, and good Muslim women are made like slaves again, or worse.

You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson.

I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in them and after school I played in orange groves and in Little League and in the band and down at the beach and every day was an adventure. . . . I grew up in utopia.