As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
The Evening Sun
Ten years later, as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition's degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T.D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.
My Life as a Quant
I come from a people who gave the ten commandments to the world. Time has come to strengthen them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shalt not be a perpetrator; thou shalt not be a victim; and thou shalt never, but never, be a bystander.
The undercurrent of raw sexuality in my movies is not a theme -- it's just an approach. For me, the human body is the first fact of human existence. I'm an atheist. I don't believe in an afterlife. To me, our bodily reality is often avoided -- a lot of art, religion, politics, and culture seek to make us avoid our existential reality. And I insist on it. ... I'm not looking to transcend the body, but to delve into it. Profoundly.
In a Globe & Mail interview
If the Trail of Tears is a glacier that inched its way west, my uncle is one of the boulders it deposited when it stopped. He had to work the farm, and the farm he worked was what was left of his grandfather's Indian allotment. And then came the Dust Bowl, and then came the war. All these historical forces bore down on him, but he did not break. Still, compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I'm so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it.
"What I See When I Look at the Face on the $20 Bill", in Take the Cannoli
My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting and humbling in the hardest way -- hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel.) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: as a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
"Consider the Lobster", in The Best American Essays 2005
In his review of "Breaking the Spell," Leon Wieseltier couldn't resist the reflexive accusation that building a worldview on a scientific base is reductive, and as is often the case, he trotted out the existence of art to capture our sympathies. As a composer, I am weary of being commandeered as evidence of supernatural forces. Unlike Wieseltier, I do not find it difficult to "envisage the biological utilities" of the "Missa Solemnis"; it merely requires a chain with more than one link.
In a letter to the New York Times
I have found that if I am turned loose in a large library, after hesitating over covers for half an hour or so, it is usually a book of soldier memoirs which I take down. Man is never so interesting as when he is thoroughly in earnest, and no one is so earnest as he whose life is at stake upon the event.
Through The Magic Door
He's the Pope. ... One must recall that this isn't just some random man in high drag who hears voices and really wants to operate vaginas on a part-time basis despite professional obligations not to.
In a discussion on Pharyngula
Our technological civilization will not last on this planet. Our existence is, clearly, not sustainable. We're going to be the next ones to become extinct. And that's okay. Let's enjoy each other while we can; make friends; go to the movies.
In an interview during Ebertfest 2007
I left the flat depressed but, as I walked down Espedair Street, back into town under a glorious sunset of red and gold, slowly a feeling of contentment, intensifying almost to elation, filled me. I couldn't say why; it felt like more than having gone through a period of mourning and come out the other side, and more than just having reassessed my own woes and decided they were slight compared to what some people had to bear; it felt like faith, like revelation: that things went on, that life ground on regardless, and mindless, and produced pain and pleasure and hope and fear and joy and despair, and you dodged some of it and you sought some of it and sometimes you were lucky and sometimes you weren't, and sometimes you could plan your way ahead and that would be the right thing to have done, but other times all you could do was forget about plans and just be ready to react, and sometimes the obvious was true and sometimes it wasn't, and sometimes experience helped but not always, and it was all luck, fate, in the end; you lived, and you waited to see what happened, and you would rarely ever be sure that what you had done was really the right thing or the wrong thing, because things can always be better, and things can always be worse.
Espedair Street
His love of each particular experiment, and his eager zeal not to lose the fruit of it, came out markedly in these crossimng experiments -- in the elaborate care he took not to make any confusion in putting capsules into wrong trays, &c, &c. I can recall his appearance as he counted seeds under the simple microscope with an alterness not usually characterising such mechanical work as counting. I think he personified each seed as a small demon trying to elude him by getting into the wrong heap, or jumping away altogether, and this gave to the work the excitement of a game.
Writing about his father Charles, who was performing experiments on plant pollination. Quoted in Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002), Janet Browne.
"I cannot endure doing nothing," [Charles Darwin] told Jenyns in 1877. It was almost as if he feared the moment when his mind might be empty, when his work might be done; and to stave off this abyss constantly found old and new topics to pursue. If not dread of idleness, then dread of decrepitude. He often said that his work made him feel alive, helped his mind sing, was the one thing that blotted out his cares. Although he called himself "a kind of machine for grinding out general laws out of a large collection of facts," the truth was he only felt himself when immersed in some demanding new project.
Quoted in Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002), Janet Browne.
A good attitude to take, from the first day of any programming project, is that the system being built is fundamentally flawed and doomed. The goal of such a project, then, is simply to build a system that will last long enough for a better one to come along, and perhaps also to be, for a brief moment suspended between eternities, the best program of its kind yet built.
Programming As If People Mattered
Nun 1: Sir, it is only a play... with music. Do not distress yourself.
Cosimo: It is only a play... with music? Does God say the same at every death? It is only a play... with music? When I die, will someone say the same? He was only a prince. He died. It was only a play... with music.
Nun 2: (Very quietly) Sir, be grateful for the music. Most of us die in silence.
The Baby of Mācon
And in the end, yes, all we have is the question of whether we go with dignity and honor, knowing that we have lived our lives with passion and compassion in equal measure. For me, that knowledge is enough to sustain me when the game is finally called on account of darkness.
In rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5