Whenever someone says zygotes are babies, I reply: 'Imagine a thousand zygotes in test tubes in one room, and three toddlers in another. A fire breaks out, and you only have time to get to one room. Which would you save from burning - the zygotes or the children?'

The book is closed, the year is done, the pages full of tasks begun. A little joy, a little care, along with dreams, are written there. This new day brings another year, Renewing hope, dispelling fear. And we may find before the end, a deep content, another friend.

The definition of strong leadership is not about making decisions that are popular. Making popular decisions is easy - you don't need to be a leader to do that. The definition of strong leadership is to make decisions that are unpopular, but are nevertheless sound.

In 'Se7en' and 'Fight Club,' Fincher proved his suave mastery of film violence; in Zodiac, his way of clarifying the many clues in a murder thriller. As he showed in 'The Social Network,' the director also knows that no wound is more toxic than a friend's betrayal.

Printing money - is it really the answer? ... If we just print a million dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country and handed it to them, won't that fix everything? Because in order to really look at printing - I like to take everything to the extreme.

Few years ago [Donald] Trump was being roasted by Comedy Central. They always have rules about things that you can't joke about. Donald Trump's rule at that time, the only thing that you couldn't joke about was a suggestion that he has less money that he claimed to.

I am not a celebrity. I work with celebrities, and it is very difficult. When a celebrity wears a dress, it's good for business, so brands fight for the red carpet. Me? I don't like it, because fashion becomes a job about dressing celebrities. And it's a bit boring.

'Noah' is about a man whose mission is to obliterate Earth's past and godfather its future. Replacing the word 'God' with 'Creator' and taking other scriptural liberties, the movie risks confusing those who don't take the Bible literally and alienating those who do.

If grownups want to dress in Tudor costume, douse babies in water, intone over the dead and do strange things with wine and wafers, it is a free country. But for a Christian sect to claim ownership of the legal definition of a human relationship is way out of order.

It is a common thing for supporters of President Trump, even as early as when he was a candidate, to say, 'He fights.' And yes, he does fight. He fights everyone. He gets into all kinds of scraps that are pointless and unnecessary. He insults when he doesn't need to.

It is unhealthy to live in an environment where every aspect of our culture requires a great sort, where creative talents are for some but not for all, and where performing for the president of the United States becomes a point of regular and significant controversy.

I think laying out a beautiful picture in a beautiful way is a bloody bore. I think you've got to blow it right across the page and down the side, crop it, cut it in half, combine it with something else... do something with it. You've got to make something out of it.

Frank Moore Cross is also a leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, which he's been since they were discovered more than 50 years ago. He's just completing an edition of one of the most significant scrolls for Biblical studies, the Book of Samuel from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.

The visual palette suggests the creepy pastel paintings of Guy Peellaert (Rock Dreams); the fantasy battles with monsters and samurais echo the muscular landscapes of Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. The movie is like an arrested adolescent's Google search run amok.

Tarantino's movies are smartly intoxicating cocktails of rampage and meditation; they're in-your-face, with a mac-10 machine pistol and a quote from the Old Testament. They blend U.S. and European styles of filmmaking; they bring novelistic devices to the movie mall.

One time, a burglar came to my apartment, so we called the police. My son was here, so I think they left before they tried to steal something. So the police come to my apartment, and they say, 'Oh my God, did they steal everything?' I was like, 'No, it was like that!'

Cuts to defense budgets are already underway...there is now a lot of emphasis starting with the President that we have to build up our capabilities for development aid, resolutions, and getting allies to cooperate more on what needs to be done in the name of security.

These are times when what used to be called liberal is now called radical; what used to be called radical is now called insane; what used to be called reactionary is now called moderate; and what used to be called insane is now called solid, neo-conservative thinking.

You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It's hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren't quite ready to give up on him yet.

As late as 2007, Facebook was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up. An advertising space seemed to be the obvious answer, but how that would tap into the massive value of the personal data uploaded to the company every day remained a puzzle.

By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish.

The lessons of the past suggest that racism and resentment against people of color will continue to flourish in America as long as the history that is taught transposes the heroes and the villains. That is the unspoken truth at the heart of the nation's racial divide.

When I joined 'Essence,' I was a young, single mother. I was 24. I hadn't gone to college. I wasn't making any money at 'Essence' - what was it, $500 a month - and I was struggling. So I was always looking down the road, always hoping for a better, you know, tomorrow.

I also think that we [Americans] are operating out of fear in our country. It's not that terrorism is not a threat, but it's not an existential threat. It is not the preeminent threat facing most Americans on any given day, and yet the power of nightmares is so strong.

In America, now, let us - Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, wiccan, whatever - fight nativism with the same strength and conviction that we fight terrorism. My faith calls on its followers to love one's enemies. A tall order, that - perhaps the tallest of all.

I am a huge admirer of Franklin Roosevelt's, and I believe social security has done untold good in alleviating the once-widespread issue of poverty among the elderly. FDR believed in the greatness and generosity of Americans - but he was also a cold-blooded politician.

He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.

When I was much younger, my siblings and I would routinely tune in to watch 'Bill Nye the Science Guy' on PBS. He was a fascinating instructor bent on helping kids achieve a basic understanding of science. When he engaged in politics, it was only very briefly if at all.

I get an award for being the best dressed, but at the end of the day I'm not Daphne Guinness. I don't like people to look at me for my dress. The letter is more important than the envelope. But if you feel good in your envelope, then you will feel better about yourself.

International Women's Day means many things to many people. Officially, it is 'a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women.' These are important points that deserve to be called out - so we all remember their significance.

Essentially, the obligation of conservative media is to question what's going on, and say, "Is this something that is the right thing to do? Is it something that's constitutional? Is it something that is even wise to do?" I think that's true regardless of who's in power.

One of the things I endeavor to remind people of consistently when I am asked to speak to groups around the country is to consider the possibility that we are led by a pack of idiots. This is not out of any animus toward our leadership class, but borne out of experience.

I think that when you're taking pictures with my principles, you can try anything. Dare to do a lot of things - dare with sexuality, dare to break taboos as long as it remains photogenic. As long as I find an elegance and beauty in it, I am not afraid to tackle anything.

It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.

There are stories about winter ghosts found tangled like lice in their lovers' hair. Dead people have no hair themselves, which is how they can be recognized in winter. But in summer, the living and dead may pass each other on the street, and no one knows the difference.

Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.

Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim - for self-development, or the discovery of cosmic truths - when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate.

It often puzzles me when people think that matters connected with sex ought to be suppressed. Sex itself cannot be suppressed, and the efforts to do it, it seems to me, result in greater damage than it can do itself. After all, it was not an invention of man, but of God.

I write about spirituality not so we get strong from within and achieve some state of nirvana and then distance ourselves from the real world. I write about it so we can feel empowered to doing the critical work that this generation of black women are charged with doing.

What we try to do at 'The Federalist' is to provide opinion and analysis that brings in a lot of different perspectives from across the Right. You'll see, a lot of times, us running an article that argues one side of something and then an article that argues the opposite.

The world of campaign consulting is full of hype. It is designed to offer those desperate for an edge on their opponent the promise of a silver bullet and a consultancy willing to go to any lengths - including all those things you'd like to do but can't - in order to win.

If you had a bump on your nose, it made no difference so long as you had a marvelous body & good carriage. You held your head high, & you were a beauty You knew how to water-ski, & how to take a jet plane fast in the morning, arrive anywhere, & be anyone when you got off.

I think we [Americans] are going to look back and realize that the civil liberties that we've given up in the name of security, the authority that we've given Democratic and Republican presidents, all have contributed to a fraying of the fabric of our democratic republic.

We are never without our technology. It surrounds us. It permeates our lives. We have powerful computers in our pockets, and we have been - you know, we are training our children from the youngest age to use social media, so it's something that comes very naturally to us.

I don't think much about the issues after they come out. I like it when people like them. Often, when people have criticisms, I find myself agreeing with them. I think some issues are stronger than others. I hope we're getting a little bit better, overall, issue by issue.

After two terms as California's Governator, Schwarzenegger slipped comfortably back into pictures with 'The Last Stand,' a modern Western, then crammed into the wide screen, as if it were a service elevator, with fellow '80s muscle car Sylvester Stallone in 'Escape Plan.'

I think the White House is filled with confrontation, and is doing things to continue it. The White House and congressional Democrats think that they have the upper hand. They look at the surveys, they look at the polls, they think the Republicans are going to get blamed.

It's very difficult to know when you're crossing the boundary. I hate the word boundary because I never think about it when taking a picture. Very often it doesn't mean anything because it depends on who's looking at the picture more than the content of the picture itself.

A lot of locked-room mysteries take time for you to pay attention and see the setup. They aren't thrillers, and they don't move along. The modern mystery story is really faster-paced, and I think modern readers tend to prefer seeing something happening on every other page.

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