Lives have been altered in fundamental ways, and later, after they acquire a more complete understanding of what goals are actually attainable, many are left facing a lot of pain and frustration. And yet, there's no culture of complaint.

I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.

'We Are... ' is all obviously about social media and kind of the insecurities around social media and how people have become addicted to their phones and altered children's minds to what they need to look like, what they need to dress like.

The main criticism that I get is, 'Aren't you just conforming to a patriarchal standard of beauty?' Well, this is just the body I was given. I didn't do anything to it - it's just my body. But even if I had altered it, that would be fine, too.

Altered social conditions may remove certain ailments and deformities in existing society. But the new and more beautiful society will not be formed exclusively - or even mainly - by improved conditions, but above all by more perfect human beings.

'Altered Carbon' is one of the most seminal pieces of post-cyberpunk hard science fiction out there - a dark, complex noir story that challenges our ideas of what it means to be human when all information becomes encodable, including the human mind.

When The Fall pummeled their way into my nervous system, circa 1983, it was as if a world that was familiar - and which I had thought too familiar, too quotidian to feature in rock - had returned, expressionistically transfigured, permanently altered.

However revolutionary it may be, the Internet still hasn't altered the basic law of human communication: Being nice to your interlocutors is a good way to start any negotiations, particularly, when being hostile is an open invitation for a cyber-fight.

You can win more arguments then you might think as a writer, even though you legally have no recourse, and your script can get muddied and altered in any way possible. You can use reason, logic, and passion to argue persuasively for a case in your favor.

The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of dreams.

North Americans as a whole need to embrace having clothes altered to their body. I hear it all the time: why do the Europeans always look so good? They have a relationship with their tailor and spend the time and money to make their clothes look their best.

I think that I altered history in 'Elizabeth,' and I interpreted history far more than Danny Boyle or Richard Attenborough did to 'Slumdog Millionaire' or 'Gandhi.' They took Indian novels or Indian characters and very much stayed within the Indian diaspora.

The reason I wrote 'I'm Too Young for This!' is to spare young women the suffering of hormonal loss - and it is true suffering. You can't sleep, you gain weight for no reason, you bloat for no reason, your moods are altered, and your sex drive is diminished.

Customers want to explore. But they need to have easy access to items they choose to use all the time. The historic trade-off between price and service has been altered by technology and customers expect to save time and enjoy the experience while saving money.

Confederation is a compact, made originally by four provinces but adhered to by all the nine provinces who have entered it, and I submit to the judgment of this house and to the best consideration of its members, that this compact should not be lightly altered.

In the two novels I have published, it was my fortune at different times, and from different persons, to hear the most unqualified censure long before it was possible for me to hear the voice of the public. But my temper was not altered, nor my courage subdued.

The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.

To a point, family does that and a couple of life experiences both positive and negative that have definitely altered my perception on rugby. Whereas my first 28-29 years, rugby was the entire focus, which was not that healthy, now you realise what is really important.

I stay true because whatever the project is, I'm still looking for inside of that character. It's the thing that connects him to me and to everybody else. So, the search is the same. It's to unveil the truth, and that's how I stay true, because my purpose isn't altered.

Ever since it was announced that Ryan Murphy intended to produce 'The People v. O.J. Simpson,' I have been inundated with the question as to 'How do I feel about it?' All I can say is, for me, it was personally the most heartbreaking tragedy that altered my life forever.

Our government and its social policies, its tax breaks, the way school days work, so much of the country we live in is built for married couples with a male breadwinner and a female domestic laborer. Government needs to be massively altered in order to serve this population.

I think writers process their own experiences through the characters and situations they write. So for Batman, I used my own experience of losing a loved one. Grief is a strange place; it's like an altered state. You might sleep too much, so you can see the dead in your dreams.

Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It's satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.

'A Burglar's Guide to the City' makes disparate connections seem obvious in hindsight, and my worldview is altered a little bit more, and far for the better, as a result. We'll never know, but I suspect Donald Westlake would have enjoyed it - and perhaps been a little unsettled by it, too.

One of the best ways to change is to act as if you are the person you want to become. When you behave as if you are a different person, you change on a very basic level - even your physiology changes. When actors and actresses perform, their body chemistry is altered by the roles they play.

My greatest fear about a world in which racial reassignment surgery becomes common is that it then becomes an expression of all kinds of class privilege. You have a truly dystopian society divided between the people who can afford to be racially altered and perfected and the ones who can't.

What I had said was that as a cricketer, you have to take care of your body and look after your fitness levels, and someone altered that statement and quoted me as saying that I wanted to quit playing Test cricket. It's totally untrue, and as long as I am fit, I want to play in all formats.

The one thing with writing stories about the rise of fascism is that if you wait long enough, you'll almost certainly be proved right. Fascism is like a hydra - you can cut off its head in the Germany of the '30s and '40s, but it'll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise.

When some states introduced mandatory smallpox vaccinations during the epidemic of 1898-1903, Americans resisted by the thousands. The ensuing battles produced medical conventions and case law that altered the balance between government authority and medical practice, in favor of federal control.

There's eco-pragmatism, where you recognize, 'Yeah, we live on a planet that's permanently altered by humanity, and rather than seek to return to or preserve pure wilderness, we recognize that's an illusion, and we proceed under the new knowledge that we live, in fact, in a human-dominated planet.'

If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.

For a spinner growing up in England, it is challenging to become an off-spinner. The line and length needs to be altered on each of the four days of county cricket or five days of Test matches. The pitches in England don't have a set pattern. It changes with each day, and accordingly, the length varies.

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version.

In 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' protagonist Winston Smith works at a propaganda department for the state called the 'Ministry of Truth,' where inconvenient news can be discarded down a 'memory hole.' Orwell was fixated on the idea that under certain governments, the past can be altered or documents rewritten.

Certainly the highest posthumous praise that can be conferred upon any writer is the assertion that his or her writing permanently altered the literary landscape for the better, opening new textual doors and engaging new readers. That the author's oeuvre was essential and irreplaceable and transformative.

More than two decades after the birth of Louise Brown, and all the hysteria that surrounded her 'test tube' conception, we should know that institutions, not technologies, create dystopias. Artificially conceived children are everywhere, beloved by their parents, and they haven't radically altered our world.

'Gorilla Man' is a composite of a few individuals, but the song itself was actually inspired by James Taylor. I spied his 'Gorilla' album laying on my floor and in some altered state, instantly started singing the chorus. It was fun to write. There's an old notebook with at least three more verses in it somewhere.

Here's something weird, though: I loved Jimi's music so much that I would never perform it for people. Throughout my teens and playing in various bands, I refused to play Hendrix songs. I know that sounds strange, but Jimi's music was so special to me that it was like works of art that shouldn't be touched or altered.

'Ragtime' was the most magical show that I've done. I had an incredible experience with that, with the show itself, with the cast, with the audience. The response to that show - my God, it really blew me away, the reactions to that show, the way it changed their lives and altered their thinking, their own self-discovery.

I'm a guy where my perfect pitch has been altered by the fact that I usually tune up to what's going on. When I was a kid, it was horrible! If two notes were playing right next to each other, and they were dissonant, it would drive me nuts. If it was something that sounded like it was in between notes, it'd make me cringe.

The murder of my husband by the railways has altered the way I think about everything. I had always thought that the majority of people were decent and honourable. In the wake of the crash, what made me angry more than anything else was the realisation that this was not true. I still find it very hard to come to terms with.

I have talked to people across the country struggling in the face of an altered climate. New Jersey homeowners are trying to rebuild after Superstorm Sandy. Miami government officials are trying to plan for rising seas and flooded streets. California farmers are trying to make it through the state's worst drought on record.

One has to explain to people that the EU in this form is the answer both to 1945 and to the 21st century, in a dramatically altered world with new heavyweights, and that Germany benefits from the continued integration of Europe in political, economic and societal ways. And, of course, that means the Germans will have to pay.

I read a book called 'The Tao of Physics' by Fritjof Capra that pointed out the parallels between quantum physics and eastern mysticism. I started to feel there was more to reality than conventional science allowed for and some interesting ideas that it hadn't got round to investigating, such as altered states of consciousness.

Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music. Remember, he was a chocolate, cherubic-faced genius with an African American halo. He had an Afro halo. He was a kid who was capable of embodying all of the high possibilities and the deep griefs that besieged the African American psyche.

As a longtime practitioner of yoga and a person who's been involved in physical fitness my whole life, I can tell you, yoga helps you achieve altered states of consciousness. It is not just stretching. The only way you can say that it's stretching is if you haven't done it, or that you haven't done it rigorously for a long period of time.

When I started working on 'Battlestar Galactica' in Canada, I was told to get as fit as a marine for my character Lee 'Apollo' Adama. So I did. But now I have a problem with suits, because I'm 5 ft. 9 in. with a 40 inch chest and a 31 inch waist, so I'm rather too big for that very tailored British look, and they always have to be altered.

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