Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The thing that's very puzzling to somebody who's been in Pakistan repeatedly since 1983 is lots of people live in compounds with high walls in Pakistan. I mean, that's so completely routine. In fact, you know, it would be un-routine to have the reverse.
Warm-bloodedness is one of the key factors that have enabled mammals to conquer the Earth, and to develop the most complex bodies in the animal kingdom. In this series, we will travel the world to discover just how varied and how astonishing mammals are.
Racing cars which have been converted for road use never really work. It's like making a hard core adult film, and then editing it so that it can be shown in British hotels. You'd just end up with a sort of half hour close up of some bloke's sweaty face.
My mom and dad were 'helicopter parents,' literally. Meaning, I didn't have a nanny, so I went up in the helicopter. My entire early childhood education consisted of tagging along while they reported on car accidents, multiple-alarm fires, and shootouts.
Aspire to decency. Practice civility toward one another. Admire and emulate ethical behavior wherever you find it. Apply a rigid standard of morality to your lives; and if, periodically, you fail as you surely will adjust your lives, not the standards.
For one of my first TV jobs, I was required to cut my hair, dress a certain way, and wear a certain amount of makeup. I was even told to have my hair cut based on a picture in a magazine. I realized that until I complied, I wasn't going to get any airtime.
The commonly accepted definition of terrorism is that it is politically motivated violence directed at civilians by entities other than a state. These kind of attacks can come from the far right, the far left, racists of every stripe, as well as jihadists.
Adding to your list of enemies is never a sound strategy, yet ISIS' ferocious campaign against the Shia, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and Muslims who don't precisely share its views has united every ethnic and religious group in Syria and Iraq against them.
I would say the thing you can still see in Black Mirror is that I was probably traumatized by the specter of nuclear war. I was born in 1971, and in the '80s I came to understand that I was inevitably going to be frazzled to death in the nuclear apocalypse.
The savage, rocky shores of Christmas Island, 200 miles south of Java, in the Indian Ocean. It's November, the moon is in its third quarter, and the sun is just setting. In a few hours from now, on this very shore, a thousand million lives will be launched.
I dish the dirt out, and I can take it. But why should my mother and children have to take it? In 20 years, I have taken any number of stories, most of which are not true, without a murmur of complaint. But some stories you have to draw the line and say No.
A traditional presidential campaign has a media bus with the candidate's name on it and an itinerary days in advance. Trump has a plane with his name on it (that we aren't invited on) and an itinerary that often mutates daily, along with his talking points.
Bitcoin's revolution: an impossible-to-counterfeit digital store of value that can be used as money, that has no sovereign, or central bank involved, that can be sent anywhere instantly at virtually no cost, is irresistible. Anyone who uses it is converted.
That's one of the great gifts of this, the greatest of all games, baseball: it allows you, still, to lose yourself in a dream, to feel and remember a season of life when summer never seemed to die and the assault of cynicism hadn't begun to batter optimism.
Don't accuse anyone with the temerity to question your sad supernatural fantasies of having a 'closed mind' or being 'blind to possibilities'. A closed mind asks no questions, unthinkingly accepting that which it wants to believe. The blindness is all yours.
Cows eat grass and silage. This is melting the ice caps and killing us all. So they need a new foodstuff: something that is rich in iron, calcium and natural goodness. Plainly they cannot eat meat so here is an idea to chew on. Why not feed them vegetarians?
I read in the papers how much I'm earning and fall about laughing because I'm sure it's not that much; otherwise, I'd have an enormous boat. I'm literally not the slightest bit interested in money. I just don't pay any attention to money; it's rather vulgar.
Starting in the wake of the 2008 GFC (Global Financial Crisis), market observers have warned of a crash in the bond market. Initially, it was believed that the trillions printed to bail out the banks would cause inflation and, therefore, a flight from bonds.
It was disconcerting for the novel to seem so different when I re-read it. Of course we are a different person each time we open a book to read it again; we can never really experience it in the same way, just as we can never step into the same stream twice.
The entire political class and ruling Wall Street class are zero-percent-interest zombies who talk about 'deflation' in the value of their second, third, and fourth homes. This is paper-deflation, zombie-deflation, and has nothing to do with the real economy.
The pro-gun advocates point to the 2nd amendment of America's Constitution, citing Americans' right to bear arms as a protection against tyrants. Pro-Bitcoin advocates want protection against tyrants, too. The difference is how these two groups define tyranny.
Starting in the mid-1990s, the end-to-end ubiquity of the Internet, combined with its cheapness, spontaneously combusted to give us Napster - a site that revolutionized the music industry overnight. We got P2P file swapping in the film and TV industry as well.
Extravagant is, I think, the word we all thought when we met ... A lot of money went into that [The Grand Tour's ]. I just thought it would be a good idea to have a bridge from the old to the new and that was a way of saying 'Right, well now look where we are.'
The rise of ISIS starts with a Jordanian thug named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who founded ISIS' parent organization, al Qaeda, in Iraq. What gave Zarqawi the opportunity to create al Qaeda in Iraq? It was, of course, George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
The climate suits me, and London has the greatest serious music that you can hear any day of the week in the world - you think it's going to be Vienna or Paris or somewhere, but if you go to Vienna or Paris and say, 'Let's hear some good music', there isn't any.
In a free market capitalist system, 'price signals' are everything. Prices are determined by buyers and sellers in the free market, and these prices are broadcast from the exchanges, reaching all corners of the economy - where they are used to transact business.
A smart politician needs to come in and create a plan for when our students graduate college, there are opportunities in fields that interest them and a job that's a career. A president whose plans can embrace and incorporate every millennial will be successful.
The upshot here is that Gil Scott-Heron is still a warrior, even if the front lines have moved. He's made a record not without hope but which doesn't come with any easy or comforting answers. In that way, the man is clearly still committed to speaking the truth.
It's extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. The things that people always go on about is, 'tell us about us', 'tell us about the first human being'. We are so self-obsessed with our own history. There is so much more out there than what connects to us.
Every lethal terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 has been carried out by an American citizen or a legal permanent resident, not by recent immigrants or by refugees. So tamping down immigration won't fix the real issue, which is 'homegrown' terrorism.
Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.
It is in American and Afghan interests for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan so it doesn't turn into Iraq circa 2014, with the Taliban controlling much of the country while hosting a strong presence of ISIS and al-Qaeda as well as every other jihadist group of note.
For many, embracing the ideology of Osama bin Laden or ISIS allowed them to become the heroes of their own story as well as actors in a cosmic crusade. For others, a 'cognitive opening' to militant Islam was often precipitated by a personal disappointment or loss.
Audiences want great story telling; it's why white people watch my show 'Black in America.' It's why black people watch 'Latina in America.' All of that is statistically shown and proven but it was because it was good story telling about people who were outsiders.
They don't want to get dirty and they know that Trump loves this kind of thing. And your polls, and yours are what's giving them the material that they need, it's the oxygen that the Trump campaign requires, a poll every three or four days showing him where he is.
Russia's economy is both cursed and blessed by oil. When the oil price goes up, there is a tremendous 'wealth effect' spilling over into all corners of the economy, but this diminishes the drive to develop other industries to diversify away from overreliance on oil.
If the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were private companies and were chronically unable to accomplish one of their key missions, their shareholders would have long ago revolted, fired their management, and their stock would be trading at values near zero.
More than a decade and half after 9/11, U.S. military actions in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and several other Muslim nations are governed by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed in the days immediately after 9/11.
It's much harder to detect a lone wolf than it is somebody who's associated with a larger organization who's having planning meetings and making phone calls to people in the organization. And so that is really how the jihad has really developed in the United States.
What I think is great style advice that people have told me is that people who are confident look beautiful. No matter what they're wearing, no matter if they're inappropriately dressed, no matter if their hair's not really done right, eyebrows haven't been tweezed.
The war on terror, sometimes known as the 'Global War on Terror' or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels.
Apart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go 'aaah'. That's what evolution does. We are programmed to do that. So to find babies the most amazing, isn't surprising, I don't think.
I don't think we treat people very well in the media, both as customers - and I call them customers - of newspapers and magazines, or TV news, and we don't understand that the greatest story that we could tell, each and every day, is the story of the people around us.
TED Women will focus on the ideas and innovations championed by women and girls. These cover everything from community development to economic growth to biodynamic farming to robotics to medical treatments to the use of technology for personal safety and peace making.
People are interested in things not necessarily covered by the mainstream media, so they download things online. The categories are growing because people find out that they're not able to get information about stories that are of interest to them on the evening news.
Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.
I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.
Minimum wage law is the 'People's Fed.' Tie minimum wage to money supply. If there is pushback against this idea, then shut down the Fed and its ability to distort the economy, penalizing labor, or make the Fed's distortions available to all businesses and all workers.
One of the themes of 'The Longest War,' my book, which came out before the Arab spring happened, was how al-Qaida and bin Laden was losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world, not because the United States was winning them, but because al-Qaida was simply losing them.
Whenever I tell people I'm a misanthrope they react as though that's a bad thing, the idiots. I live in London, for God's sake. Have you walked down Oxford Street recently? Misanthropy's the only thing that gets you through it. It's not a personality flaw, it's a skill.