Authors From The United States

"There are two Trumps. The one he presents to the world is all bluster, and certainty. The other, which I have long felt haunts his inner world, is the frightened child of a relentlessly critical and bullying father and a distant and disengaged mother who couldn’t or wouldn’t protect him."

"Trump’s temperament and his habits have hardened with age. He was always cartoonish, but compared with the man for whom I wrote The Art of the Deal 30 years ago, he is significantly angrier today: more reactive, deceitful, distracted, vindictive, impulsive and, above all, self-absorbed – assuming the last is possible."

"Because the office Trump now occupies makes him the most powerful man on Earth, his fears, and the way he manages them, have necessarily become ours. We fear Trump because he is impulsive, irrational and self-serving, but above all because he seems unconstrained by even the faintest hint of conscience. Trump feels no more shame over his most destructive behaviours than a male lion does killing the cubs of his predecessor when he takes over a pride. Trump has made fear the dominant emotion of our times."

"About the only thing Trump truly has in common with his base is that he feels every bit as aggrieved as they do, despite his endless privilege. No amount of money, fame or power has been enough to win him the respect he so insatiably craves. His anger over this perceived injustice is visceral and authentic."

"I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is. I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization."

"The fearful divide Trump has exacerbated is not simply between his supporters and his detractors, the rich and the poor, or Democrats and Republicans, but between the best and the worst in each of us."

"If you take a look back at the history of man, you will not find one instance where an average woman’s advice about dating or relationships was better than an average man’s."

"The demographic crisis the West faces today is primarily due to allowing women to do as they please [...] The direct cause of this horror movie is giving women the vote."

"Apollo is the greatest adventure of all humankind, and it needs to be recorded in every way possible for future generations in books, in movies and on television. … I’m an artist. That’s the way I care about things. Maybe 200 years from now, someone will say, "I’m glad he did that.""

"Everyone is trying to reach for their own stars, and all of those stars aren’t light-years away. They are as close as our job, our family, our children, our next-door neighbors and our good friends."

"History has spurts and then is steady, and then maybe even backing up a step, and then forward again."

"The movement of human beings off the planet out into the Universe; first the Moon, and then Mars, and then who knows where, is just beginning and there is nothing that can stop it. None of us know the timetable, none of us know whether it's going to happen rapidly or it's going to happen very slowly. Eventually, as the centuries unfold, human beings will populate all these places and maybe a thousand years from now, or maybe it's two thousand or five thousand, there will be more human beings living off the Earth than live on it. Its just going to happen and we don't need to be anxious about it. We don't need to worry that next year they decide to cut the space station. If they cut the space station next year, I hope they don't, but if they did, it's not the end of the world. We're going to eventually have a wonderful space station. Eventually there are going to be cities in space. If Chicago had been founded a hundred years later, we wouldn't even know that now. I don't know when it was founded, but if it had been a hundred years later or a hundred years earlier, right now it wouldn't make any difference. It would probably look about the same. People would be just as happy doing the same things. That's the same way with space exploration. Maybe we don't go to Mars in my lifetime, maybe we don't even go till my grandkids lifetime. That's okay. Eventually it will happen."

"I think Genesis in the Old Testament has it wrong. I don’t think we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Just look around. We’re still in it, particularly when you compare the earth with the moon. The moon has no plants, no life, no water, no animals, no nothing."

"Long after I’m gone, people will have these paintings with dust and footprints in them. It will be something really special for people to enjoy and remember."

"I recently posted about Oculus/Facebook and their data collection. Let me go more in depth and this isn’t just about today this is about the future of XR. At the heart of the matter are these points where their and actions differ from other XR companies. FB tracks and stores all device movement and location. They also have wording to allow them to track all communication and interaction with their services. They have been caught capturing call and sms data on android phones through their FB app using similar language. FB doesn’t have a Hardware guy in charge of Oculus Hardware – instead, they have Boz – an ad guy, a data guy who recently made thoughts on your value as a FB user very clear. And if you are still confused, FB isn’t a social media company, it is a data tracking company. Why care that they track this data? Think the future, not just today. When there are XR apps and devices that you use regularly outside your home. Where natural feature tracking means cameras and microphones strapped to your head recording and saving everything. ... So it isn’t just Facebook and what they will do with this data, but this data’s existence is a threat to our privacy and freedom."

"“Do you feel free?” “I feel like I’ve lost too much.” “Freedom can feel that way.”"

"In this future, we were free of systems. Other humans went on to become symbols, sacrificed their lives to serve. Other humans handled the torture, the coups, the healing. We simply sowed, harvested, and drank a bit before dinner. No one tried to take what was ours. We had too little. We were invisible, and in this slower life we were our own gods."

"Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it."

"I wanted the basic needs of human existence—satiation of hunger, good health, love—to take on the shapes of small fruits we could plant and harvest. But who would be the plantation owners, and who the harvesters?"

"“My father never did anything else after that,” Valerie said. “Mostly, he became a drunk. But a man only needs one thing to be proud of. It will carry him through the rest of his life.”"

"I couldn’t exist here. In the world that had come into being due to my absence."

"I wonder which group I belong to. Can I be with the youth, the hedonists turning Prague into a playground of the Old Continent? Or does my destination, the science department of Univerzita Karlova, put me in with that other dreaded group, the adults, those who get up in the morning and know exactly how their day will unravel, those who live on the exchange system of work, awaiting their grave with quiet politeness?"

"Being of use to the world doesn’t always mean having your name in the papers...My plea to you is, think beyond celebrity. Do you think Tesla cared if he had his picture taken? Think of whether you’re any good to anyone, truly."

"Death would be so much easier to dance with if it weren’t surrounded by the clutter of civilization."

"To fear a truth! Blasphemy!"

"The universe assigned the tasks of speaking and kissing to the lips because there is never a need to do both at the same time."

"What did you expect? the core asked me. No, I asked that of myself. Another projection. My desperation to ascribe personality and will to capricious outcomes of chaos. The true kings of the world, elements and particles, had no agenda except movement."

"His presence was soothing, but his existence incomprehensible."

"The greatness of a nation is in its symbols, its gestures, in doing things that are unprecedented. It’s why the Americans are falling behind—they built a nation on the idea of doing new things, and now they’d rather sit and pray that the world won’t make them adapt too much."

"The body must not be violated. This is the greatest truth of the universe."

"In one book, your father is a hero. In another book, he is a monster. The men who don’t have books written about them have it easier."

"For what it’s worth, the sociocultural rituals of your society seem to be in conflict with biological reality."

"The organization of religion is self-defeating, a trap for sin."

"I have visited a few astronauts, but all three either ignored me or prayed. The senseless chanting, I confess, repulsed me."

"His conviction is a compulsion not subject to self-preservation."

"Miracles were nonsense, mere coping mechanisms."

"By the early 1900s...it was becoming commonplace in the academy to speak of race, along with class and gender, as a social construct .... The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ... Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc.... Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed — not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.""

"This world is a pretty good place under normal conditions, but anyone who’s read Russian history knows what a bad place it can be."

"In 1982, the main problems were getting something out in front of the public and then figuring out how to sell it. Today, it is much easier to solve the mechanical problems of self-publishing and to reach an audience, but the fact that it’s easier creates another problem: how can you be heard above all the noise? The mass of information that is available today, through film, television, books, magazines, newspapers, and the Internet is really intimidating."

"From the start, the prose in my Hank books copied the storytelling techniques of ranchers and cowboys, which means it was heavily influenced by an oral tradition. It was a natural and easy step to move from reading my stories aloud to audiences in Perryton, to recording them in a studio in Amarillo. The Hank audios have the feel of the radio programs I listened to in the fifties: character voices, background music, and sound effects."

"If we didn’t face death, we’d all be useless. Makes us more efficient in the use of our time and appreciative of the time we have."

"In empire, you believe in that which you preserve, you preserve that which you are entitled to, and you are entitled to that which you have accumulated. ... That is the religion, the animating spirit, of empire."

"I think whenever you write something you want people to like it. The best way to do that, usually, is to write what you think is good. That’s basically what everyone tries to do… just to write what they think is good. Part of that is staying true to the characters and the world (which makes it a kids show by it’s design)... and part of that is introducing deeper concepts that we, as writers, are curious about exploring (which makes it more interesting for adults)."

"I had a lot of growing pains adjusting to the comic book writing format. The whole writing process just didn’t make sense to me. I had to somehow construct each panel just by describing it? But how many panels to a page? How much dialogue should be in each panel? How much time should pass between each panel? All these sorts of things were mind-boggling to me. By the end of writing the script, I sort of figured out some of my mistakes."

"Our treatment of animals is the last moral frontier, the ultimate test of our humanity, the mirror by which we can see most deeply into our own souls."

"I think it is important that people be made aware that the vegetarian movement has a venerable history behind it. It didn't spring full-blown from the head of a flower child in the 1960's. It really begins with Pythagoras in the West in the 6th century BC and has reasserted itself periodically ever since."

"Scientists are not known for the graces of courtesy and tact when commenting on the work of others."

"If speaking to nonscientific audiences is something that interests you or will likely be asked of you, keep in mind three overriding requirements: first, you must be a human being, an interesting one if at all possible; second, you must be accurate in what you say, that is, tell the truth (about what is known and what isn't; about issues, debates, controversies); and third, if your subject is scientific knowledge, you must remain a scientist and not slip into the role of advocate or activist."

"My perspective of veganism was most affected by learning that the veal calf is a by-product of dairying, and that in essence there is a slice of veal in every glass of what l had thought was an innocuous white liquid—milk."

"How many talks have you sat through where the researcher qua [as] person just didn't show up: no anecdotes, no personal details, no emotion or enthusiasm, no humor (intentional, that is), no real contact with the audience – in other words, no performance. [...] They may satisfy the second two requirements mentioned above – accuracy and nonadvocacy – but they fail in the first and, in some ways, the most important."