Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Abu Musab al-Suri is someone I got to know pretty well because he's a Syrian. Very bright guy, lived in London. He actually was the person who took myself and correspondent Peter Arnett and the cameraman, Peter Juvenal, to interview bin Laden for his first TV interview.
The reason that attacks by American terrorists who are not jihadist militants are sometimes not called 'terrorism' is, in part, because in the United States, terrorism is a crime which has to be in some way be associated with a 'designated' terrorist group such as ISIS.
As more wealth and political power is amassed - as bitcoins rise in value - Congress and various lobbying groups will be influenced to an ever greater extent by the interests of Bitcoin owners who - in turn - will lobby to keep the Internet and Bitcoin alive and growing.
After that transition to the White House, Donald Trump will settle in for his first day of work, January 21, 2017. He's already proposed the actions he wants to take within his first 100 days in office, but which campaign promises can he realistically tackle in that time?
MaxCoin is competing for the crypto buck, if you will. So is Bitcoin, so is Dogecoin. Alt-coins are proving to be formidable because there's a solid community behind it, there's a use for it, and it's got a great market capitalisation. I think that's going to be a winner.
When ISIS and al Qaeda have attacked or plotted attacks in the West in the past decade or so, they have invariably used hydrogen peroxide-based bombs because acquiring military-grade explosives or dynamite is nearly impossible for would-be terrorists in Western countries.
I don't like rats, but there's not much else I don't like. The problem with rats is they have no fear of human beings, they're loaded with foul diseases, they would run the place given half the chance, and I've had them leap out of a lavatory while I've been sitting on it.
I like to be loved by my children, and I quite like the 'Guardian' hating me. I like it when I read they want me to die painfully. Then I think I've really got under their skin. It's like annoying a teacher. Once they've shown signs of weakness, you really can go for them.
For every shrill and violent voice that throws itself in front of microphones and cameras in the name of God, there are countless lives of gentleness and good works who will not. We need to see and hear them, as well, to understand the whole story of religion in our world.
True browsing means that we discover shelves and subjects that we could not have anticipated when we started. And the books we read introduce us to other books, as if we are at a magnificent party of the mind, being ever welcomed by new friends to join in the conversation.
Asking the front wheels of a car to do their normal job of steering while handling more than 170 is like asking a man to wire a plug while juggling. Penguins. While making love. To a beautiful woman while on fire, on stage. In front of the Queen. It's all going to go wrong.
I'd like to see the giant squid. Nobody has ever seen one. I could tell you people who have spent thousands and thousands of pounds trying to see giant squid. I mean, we know they exist because we have seen dead ones. But I have never seen a living one. Nor has anybody else.
Banking, as far as I can tell, seems to be almost as precise a science as using a slot machine. You either blindly hope for the best, delude yourself into thinking you've worked out a system, or open it up when no one's looking and rig the settings so it'll pay out illegally.
Everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety.
I've never actually met one in the wild, but I have seen a king cobra. They go towards people, they rear up six feet tall and they're very aggressive and they are very fast. And one bite means certain death. So if I encountered a king cobra in the wild I would be very alarmed.
Bitcoin is probably the most portable money in the history of the world. I can download any amount onto a thumb drive and walk across any border without any problems. Or, I could commit to memory a line of code that I can then input into the network and save or spend Bitcoins.
It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.
I had a huge advantage when I started 50 years ago - my job was secure. I didn't have to promote myself. These days there's far more pressure to make a mark, so the temptation is to make adventure television or personality shows. I hope the more didactic approach won't be lost.
In 1971, the U.S. 'closed the gold window,' starting an era of global fiat money reference-pricing that has been unprecedented in history. Never before had the world operated on the basis of no country anywhere having a currency tied to something with intrinsic value like gold.
As Michael Scheuer, who ran the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit until 1999, has pointed out, if bin Laden believed in Christmas, the Iraq war would be his perfect present from Santa Claus. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan severely damaged bin Laden's organization.
While the story about the hunt for bin Laden has been exhaustively reported and the key sources and witnesses are in agreement about the main points of the narrative, of course, it's still possible that we could learn new details about the story that would add to the narrative.
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad belongs to the small Alawite sect and is therefore considered a heretic by many Sunnis; al-Assad runs a secular regime, and therefore he is considered by Sunni militants to be an apostate, and he is inflicting a total war on his Sunni population.
The theatre always seems to be in trouble but always thriving. It's deeply comical to me that we agonize about our crap football teams and indifferent Test sides when in front of our noses is a great world success story that no one's interested in apart from those who work in it.
If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.
The newest Ferrari of them all, the 458, the Italia. The GT3 was good, but nowhen near as good as this... almost nothing on Earth is as good as this... Set that something I've just told, involving Cameron Diaz... and some honey... then it comes that even that isn't as good as this.
Mattis has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama's policies on Iran and Obama's capping of troop numbers and campaign end-dates in theaters of war such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Mattis also appears to be a skeptic of the Obama-era policy of putting women into combat roles.
Investing in women and girls may once have been considered a radical notion or even a waste of resources, but in most places in the world today, women and girls are increasingly recognized as a critical link to greater prosperity, political stability, better health and public policy.
The combined outrage of the millions of creatures which have suffered at the hands of man may well combine to haunt us. We are all of the same family, though destiny has assigned us to different roles: in our relationship with animals, we should regard them as different, not inferior.
The single most important thing is to know the game. Study the history of the game, the fine points of the game, and the personalities of the game so you'll be able to recognize what they're doing out there and then you'll be able to anticipate certain things that are going to happen.
Like every big organisation these days, the BBC is obsessed with the wellbeing of those who set foot on its premises. Studios must display warning notices if there is real glass on the set, and the other day I was presented with a booklet explaining how to use a door. I am not kidding.
What artists are doing, and what people who are receiving the arts are doing, is entering into this agreement to occupy a parallel world. The parallel world is ever-expanding. We used to think that it existed only for people who were wealthy, well-born, or educated. It isn't like that.
It is truly not fun to be the family that sticks out in an all-white community. On the other side, I have five brothers and sisters; we all look exactly the same, and we're very, very tight. The lessons about race were not pleasant, but there are things that I loved about my childhood.
Every single of us is going to be saying, "Thank God, finally, an interesting convention." But you're right about all those people out there. All the people who have been energized by the Trump campaign are going to be very, very angry folk if they think that Trump is not well treated.
It's a barrel of laughs, isn't it? It makes The Day After look like friggin'...insert name of cheerful thing here. It was one of the things that made me really worry about worst-case scenarios. There's something impish and probably somewhat therapeutic about thinking about those things.
Anyone who fears, as I do, that today's public schools are dangerously close to being irrelevant must read this book. The authors provide a road map-and a lifeline-showing how schools can prosper under the most difficult conditions. It is a welcome departure from all the school bashing.
Ireland is a wonderful place to write in. Even although the atmosphere was so Faith-laden that I was often worried that I was not writing a book to the glory of God, I had to admit that words flowed from my pen like all-get-out. To be honest, there is nothing to do in Ireland but write.
People will say you cannot get a job in a down economy. People will say you cannot get a job that you love that will pay you well. People will say you can’t do good and do well. They’re wrong, that’s idiotic advice. People will tell you that you cannot change the world. They’re wrong too.
If you're thinking of coming to America, this is what it's like: you've got your Comfort Inn, you've got your Best Western, and you've got your Red Lobster where you eat. Everybody's very fat, everybody's very stupid and everybody's very rude - it's not a holiday programme, it's the truth.
The sitting prime minister, Jose Aznar, who had strongly backed the U.S.-led Iraq War, was unseated by a challenger who then pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq. The Madrid terrorist attacks are generally regarded as being the key to why Aznar, who had been leading in the polls, was defeated.
Goldman Sachs now has the biggest oil position in America and probably one of the biggest oil positions in the world. They're long oil. So the banks have aggressively been buying oil on their balance sheets. I think they might see this as a way to bail themselves out of this mortgage crisis.
Activists need to educate themselves about the power of crypto currencies like Bitcoin, invented in 2009, and use crypto to leverage the success of their independent media gains to tip the balance of power away from the troika in ways that could never happen by backing a political candidate.
Osama bin Laden fervently hoped that attacking the United States would create pressure on American leaders to reduce their support for Middle Eastern regimes. Bin Laden believed that without that American support, the Arab regimes would collapse and would be replaced by Taliban-style rulers.
Trump displays many of the traits of a proto-fascist, and he is also part of a wave of right-wing nationalist movements that is sweeping the West. He can also be positioned in the long, American right-wing tradition of fearing 'the Other,' whether they are Catholics or Jews or, now, Muslims.
Because Scotland and Northern Ireland want to remain part of the E.U., there is the quite real possibility that Scotland and even Northern Ireland might now choose to go their own way on membership within the E.U. and the 'United Kingdom' would suddenly effectively be only England and Wales.
Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.
My parents got ahead in the news business with wits, guts, and a creative interpretation of 'fair game.' They leased their first helicopter in 1985, when KTLA news crews were on strike. Maybe the crews had good grievances, maybe not. Either way, my parents ignored the strike and went to work.
In Syria, a no-fly zone targeted at Assad's air force and safe zones for refugees fleeing the fighting would help tamp down the death toll that plays into the hands of ISIS and other Sunni militants who can position themselves as the only groups that are really defending the Sunni population.
Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we've grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.
If I ran a national burger franchise - which I don't - I'd make it a rule that no two customers can be greeted with precisely the same words and that every third customer must be grossly insulted as a matter of course. Just to keep the atmosphere nice and lively. And to keep the staff laughing.
TED Women isn't championing a cause; it's surfacing and sharing some of the most important ideas of our time. Our focus is on women as change agents, innovators and idea champions, and I think people will be both inspired and surprised by the program. We're exploring some fascinating territory!