We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

If we'd lived in England or America we'd have told stories abut our lives and nobody would have called it protest theatre. But the reality of South Africa was the arrests and detentions and oppression - we could not escape that, so we decided to take it on.

There are many ways of encouraging people to make life better other than joining a political party. Politics with a small 'p' isn't just about darkened committee rooms, endless meetings - it is about giving people the right to make decisions about our lives.

If we have faith in Jesus Christ, the hardest as well as the easiest times in life can be a blessing. In all conditions, we can choose the right with the guidance of the Spirit. We have the gospel of Jesus Christ to shape and guide our lives if we choose it.

True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we've expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways.

Non-disclosure in the Internet Age is quickly perceived as a breach of trust. Government, corporations and each of us as individuals must recalibrate how we live and share our lives appropriate to the information now available and the expectations of others.

In barely one generation, we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

As a child growing up in refugee camps, life taught me that many things were impossible. My older sister, Claire, taught me otherwise when her strength and resilience made the impossible possible in the way she worked, behaved, and took control of our lives.

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

When I first ran for public office, it was with the passion and idealism of a young man who believed that government could help make our lives better, that public service was a calling and that citizenship demanded responsibilities. There was a greater good.

In that I found being able to talk to my family about my feelings, praying for strength and realizing that our lives have a deep purpose and the journey of our lives is to find out what that is and express it, was the only way I could have gotten through it.

I think we spend so much of our lives trying to pretend that we know what's going to happen next. In fact we don't. To recognize that we don't know even what will happen this afternoon and yet having the courage to move forward - that's one meaning of faith.

My manager and I were broke for about three years together. That was the worst time of our lives and the best time of our lives. You have nothing, and it also is this great blank canvas of how to be inspired and how to dream up your whole life out of nothing.

Security is, I would say, our top priority because for all the exciting things you will be able to do with computers - organizing your lives, staying in touch with people, being creative - if we don't solve these security problems, then people will hold back.

We all have, in my family, what we call the 'Vorderman bottom' - a sticky out, bigger-than-normal, signature, of the rear variety. It's been a family joke all our lives - even my lovely brother has one. I know the lines to all the good singalong big bum songs.

There are good people who are dealt a bad hand by fate, and bad people who live long, comfortable, privileged lives. A small twist of fate can save or end a life; random chance is a permanent, powerful player in each of our lives, and in human history as well.

For Americans of the Greatest Generation that fought World War II and of the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s, the great moral and ideological cause was the Cold War. It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives.

Those of us who believe in God and those of us who have dedicated our lives to helping others in the name of God don't want to take a second seat to anyone who is suggesting that one word out of the platform means that the Democrats across America are godless.

I became an actor in that important drama with an inflexible resolution to persevere through the last scene, when we might be permitted and acknowledged to enjoy what we had so nobly declared we would possess, or lose with our lives - Freedom and Independence!

I have lunches with my girlfriends, who just turned 40, and some of those lunches, we're crying and screaming about our husbands, saying we want to leave them and run away. And then, other lunches, we're fine and love our husbands and are happy with our lives.

The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.

Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness.

Both the Winter and the Summer Solstices are expressions of love. They show us the opposition of light and dark, expansion and contraction, that characterize our experiences in the Earth school so that we can recognize our options as we move through our lives.

In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.

And we think that our citizens and yours would be very angry if they thought that we hadn't taken every possible step for prevention and then for joint action in the likelihood of those who threaten our lives and our well- being, taking action at the same time.

We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.

My parents would always have us, as many times as we could, sit together for dinner and talk about what was happening in our lives, and so we created a great recipe where I could be completely honest with my mother and to an extent my father, being an attorney.

I think it's harder for people than it should be. But as more and more of us become carbon neutral and change the patterns in our lives to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem, we are now beginning to see the changes in policy that are needed.

On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludicrous propositions, and are willing to organize their lives around them.

Clearly, the Scripture tells us that we lack the capacity to grasp God's infinite mind or the way He intervenes in our lives. How arrogant of us to think otherwise! Trying to analyze His omnipotence is like an amoeba attempting to comprehend the behavior of man.

It feels like we have two threads running through our lives: one pulling us into the world to achieve, the other pulling us back to replenish us. These threads can seem at odds, but really, they enforce each other. It's not a trade-off between success and sleep.

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

So I think that good journalism helps you to zoom out, to focus on the structural forces that govern our lives. And I think that good journalism is also not only about the problems, but also about the solutions, and the people who are working on these solutions.

When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.

What scares me? Oh, now that's a big question. I don't know what scares me - cockroaches, nuclear apocalypse. Fear is an interesting thing. It has a place in all of our lives. I try to be as fearless as possible. I don't always succeed, but I like to think I try.

When top scientists and psychologists talk about what's important to our overall wellbeing and how satisfied we are with our lives, the only thing that they all agree on is that social relationships are probably the single best predictor of our overall happiness.

I am an Egyptian Muslim, educated in Cairo and New York, and now living in Vienna. My wife and I have spent half our lives in the North, half in the South. And we have experienced first hand the unique nature of the human family and the common values we all share.

Ten years ago, you wrote a book and you never expected to find out anything about the author. Now with social media, everyone wants that connection. I think our readers want to be invited into our lives and brought on the journey and be part of this whole process.

Complete objectivity is not an option. We are all subjective about the way we respond to 'what is,' whether it's the people we encounter, the circumstances in our lives, or ourselves. What we can do is reduce our subjectivity - what I call 'I see, therefore it is.'

I also believe that government has no business telling us how we should live our lives. I think our lifestyle choices should be left up to us. What we do in our private lives is none of the government's business. That position rules out the Republican Party for me.

Only 20 percent of our longevity is genetically determined. The rest is what we do, how we live our lives and increasingly the molecules that we take. It's not the loss of our DNA that causes aging, it's the problems in reading the information, the epigenetic noise.

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life? I believe a lot of our lives are spent asleep, and what I've been trying to do is hold on to those moments when a little spark cuts through the fog and nudges you.

Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?

I have come a long way and learnt a lot. I read this quote about a year ago: 'Happiness must not be pursued; it must ensue.' It's made me realise that just being married again or something like that won't make me happy; the happiness ensues from how we live our lives.

Instead of this fruitless debate about having it all, men and women should focus on what make us happy. Instead of comparing our lives with people we don't know who are making sacrifices we don't see, we should try to find the right balance between home and work life.

Out of the suffering of the 1930s, Britain built a civilising society, based in large part on the important lesson that unemployment is rarely the fault of individual malingering but the structural consequence of governments allowing the free market to rule our lives.

Human nature must be changed if we are ever to have an end to war or to correct the wrong situations that make our lives uneasy and our hearts sore. Now Christianity, the power of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit of God, is the only force that can change people for good.

We nonchalantly expect that next year's smartphone will be faster and better than this year's, yet we struggle to imagine that society and our lives could progress at anything like the pace at which technology advances and we meekly accept it when things go backwards.

Mitch and I have known each other for such a long time, and we're both so pleased to be given this opportunity at this point in our lives to play characters that we've never really had a chance to play before. It's a great gift. Plus we're wise enough to appreciate it.

I am disturbed when I see the majority of so-called Christians having such little understanding of the real nature of the faith they profess. Faith is a subject of such importance that we should not ignore it because of the distractions or the hectic pace of our lives.

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