It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

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

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.

No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?

My final, considered judgment is that the hardy bulb [garlic] blesses and ennobles everything it touches - with the possible exception of ice cream and pie.

Literature is the expression of society.

The best way to win a game is not to lose it.

Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.

Faith is a reality and it reaches out to facts that are more solid, more real, more substantial, and more eternal than anything registered by our physical senses.

I've lived for 10 years in Switzerland, so I speak German.

There is a big difference between tweeting to your friend about something that is happening and having a real personal relationship with people.

A film set is a workplace for me; it's my office, and nobody really wants to be in a stressful work environment.

My name is only an anagram of toilets.

Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter.