Beginning is not only a kind of action. It is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness.

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.

History is written by those who win and those who dominate.

You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit

Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.

We can not fight for our rights and our history as well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated consciousness.

Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.

The history of other cultures is non-existent until it erupts in confrontation with the United States.

My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.

Cooler heads prevail while things spin completely out of control.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

While the goal of a book is to create a positive emotional experience for the reader, the goal of the opening is to set the stage, to pull the reader in.

Accept the present moment without judgement.

Much of my experience of life has cost me a great price and I wish to use it for strengthening and comforting other souls.

Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain Clings cruelly to us.

Survival is not possible if the best of us lack all conviction, while the worst of us are full of passionate intensity.

To work a fell revenge a man's a fool, if not instructed in a woman's school.

Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, has been respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.

If I wasn't an actress I would run a fortune 500 company.