A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names.

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

Learn from Bad and Understand from Good.

Certainly, the wealth of the rich is a consequence of the poverty of the poor. (Lori Altmann, p. 85)

We must recognize that the suffering of one person or one nation is the suffering of humanity.

Disappointment resides in expectation. Showing a little regard creates consideration, which results in understanding. Steps to a peace of mind.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and halfway closed there after.

The beautiful invariably possesses a visible and a hidden beauty; and it is certain that no style is so beautiful as that which presents to the attentive reader a half-hidden meaning.

Let the punishment be proportionate to the offense.

There was a period of cinema, in the mid-90's, that I was a huge fan of, with Heat and Seven, and the Tarantino era. If I've ever been fanatical, it was about those films.

It is only when our life proceeds within bounds and in an accepted, disciplined way, that the mind can be free.