Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.

In this era of globalization we are witnessing struggles within individual states about what their identity and interests consist in.

We live on a restless planet in a violent universe.

Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.

Moral revolutions are typically seen retrospectively. Prospectively, the revolutionaries tend to look like crazy people, and sometimes they are.

I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna.

One of the real dangers of our time is people's indifference to history.

Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.

I'm a subjectivist about morality.

Ethics is prescriptive and can change behavior, but usually only at the margins.

Don't always use prudence for precaution, sometimes use it for progress.

I never realizedtill nowhow hard the brain has to workto make the body do what it asks.Or maybe how hard the body has to workto ignorethe brain.

You can always find contradictions and hope, in hopeless circumstances, and a sense of redemption in somebody who makes the same mistake, over and over. So far, so good. That's how I put it.

I was shooting one day and it struck me that I was the age that Shirley MacLaine was when she played my mother. I had to sit down. I had to get a chair, okay? It was a weird moment.

You have to earn money the hard way. Because no-one will serve it up to you on a silver platter.

It has been my unbroken policy not to see newspaper writers or give interviews to anyone. At the word interview spoken or written my ears go up and my chin out.

From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.

What we assume, what we have never clearly thought out, controls us.

I had become increasingly concerned in recent years about the lack of civics education in our nation's schools. In recent years, the schools have stopped teaching it. And it's unfortunate.

By losing present time, we lose all time.