History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.

Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder's family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40% of the US population: 120 million people.

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.

The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.