In my life, anyway, anytime that I judge something to be rigidly right or wrong, it comes from fear.
Thin skin is the only kind of skin human beings come with.
There's nothing so dangerous for manipulators as people who choose to think for themselves.
There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep.
In government and out, there are vast realms of the bureaucracy dedicated to seeking more information, in perpetuity if need be, in order to avoid taking action.
Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. . . . What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.
Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.
Today the governments of Latin America should be ashamed of not havingexterminated the indigenous, at the end of the twentieth century, because weexist at the end of this century. We are not myths of the past, ruins in thejungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims ofintolerance and racism.
We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.
A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism.
Ten years ago, it was really difficult for a young actress to walk onto a set and disagree with the director and having that be OK and have a conversation about it and everyone be cool with it.