I like to think that as I get older I'm getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with.

Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality; silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.

What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.

Success is not about who never fails. It is about who can spring - or even stagger - back up.

Violence against women isn't cultural, it's criminal. Equality cannot come eventually, it's something we must fight for now.

Without investing in the rule of law for the poor, none of the other investments we make will be sustainable.

It is easy to get used to the morning news, habituated. But don't. The morning news is yours to alter.

My basic feeling about military intervention is that it should be a last resort, undertaken only to stave off large-scale bloodshed.

Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise.

Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.

American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term.

Nothing's really changed since then, except that now any children we have might be wizards themselves, and I'll be hopelessly outnumbered.

Experience may be hard but we claim its gifts because they are real even though our feet bleed on its stones.

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.

A fool despises good counsel, but a wise man takes it to heart.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

The intention of each lesson is getting you to recognize what you're doing, kinesthetically. Once you're conscious of it, you then can choose whether to continue doing the same thing or not.

Scotland small? Our multiform, infinite Scotland SMALL?

Well, I really don't like heights. I don't get on the top deck of a double-decker because that's a bit high for me. I always feel that I'm going to hurl myself off, so heights are a problem.

Seriously, however, I learn a lot about my physical life in the aging and changing of my body.

The case for meat-eaters - if eating meat is a sin, then why are some plants carnivorous?