Travel, in the superficial sense at least, is a good cure for loneliness. When you travel, especially in the third world, you quickly find that you get more friends than you know what to do with.

I think China's view of freedom has to do with material wealth and modernity, and the Dalai's Lama view of freedom is liberation in the Buddhist sense, which is freedom from ignorance and freedom from suffering.

What we have to do is act as clearly and with as pure motivation as is possible now, and that will sow the seeds for good action maybe in the twenty-second century.

If you'd asked me some years ago, I would have said [Dalai Lama] is an extraordinarily compassionate, clear-sighted, calm human being. But now, I'm more convinced than ever that his political positions as well as his spiritual positions arise out of such precise and realistic thinking that they're extremely sound.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.

The Dalai Lama, these days, encourages Westerners not to take up Buddhism, partly because he feels that our roots are deep in other traditions, and we should go deeper into our own traditions rather than just acquiring the surfaces of others.