What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents.

As the most religious country of the 18 surveyed, the U.S. also comes in with the highest rates for teen pregnancy and for gonorrhea and syphilis.

Take the year a country first reaches 50% literacy and add one or two generations to allow the idea to sink in and, democracy, more or less automatically, appears.

It doesn't matter what we think we are there [in Afghanistan] for; it matters what they think. They think we are invaders.

The scientists are really scared. Their [global warming] observations over the past two or three years suggest that everything is happening a lot faster than their climate models predicted.

The real requirement, if we are to avoid runaway global warming, is probably 80% by 2030, and almost no burning whatever of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) by 2050.

Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end.

The dark side of blogging is, of course, people can be (and are) just savage and uncivilized, deeply cruel and fully unaccountable.

The worst thing we can do is to do nothing.

I'm content. I want to have better success in the tournaments than I've had, but I know I'm playing well, so I'm happy with that.

I do have a natural sense for business, which I think I get from my Dad.

It's only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of oversmoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate.

Death's gruesome face taunts: soulless eyes, crimson grimace. I really hate clowns.

I used drugs as a social activity; a way to have fun with friends.

We may love men and we may live with men, but some of them have said stupendously inaccurate things about us, our bodies, and our psyches.

It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads.