Authors From The United States

"“Green" issues make headlines these days, but many seem unaware that without the "blue" there could be no green, no life on Earth and therefore none of the other things that humans value. Water-the blue-is the key to life. With it, anything is possible; without it, life does not exist."

"All things considered, it seems so reasonable that people should care about the oceans and should be driven by a sense of urgency about knowing more. One of the great unsolved mysteries of the sea is why they don't. An aquatic atmosphere covers most of the planet's surface, encompasses the continents, and provides a home for most of life on Earth, yet it remains for humankind inaccessible and unknown, by and large ignored, overlooked, or simply taken for granted. How is this possible?"

"Our soaring population may suggest success as a species, but the environmental price of modern civilization is high, and our prosperity may be short-lived."

"I feel like a witness to—I am—to the greatest era of change on the planet as a whole. Anybody who’s been around even for ten years is a part of this, but the longer you’ve been around, the more you’ve seen. And the last half-century, in particular, has been a time of revolutionary change. We didn’t know the existence of those great mountain chains, hydrothermal vents, the existence of life in the deepest sea, seven miles down. Nobody had been there. Not until 1960 was it possible for two men to make a descent to the deepest part of the sea."

"Earth's life-support system-the ocean-is failing. But who is paying attention?"

"Perversely, the natural living systems that over billions of years have generated and shaped planetary chemistry in ways that make Earth hospitable for humankind are being destroyed at breathtaking speed. This, too, we now know. Now that I know, I hope to convey a sense of urgency to others, to inspire use of the special powers that humans possess to take actions to protect what remains and restore whatever we can of the natural living systems that give us life, and provide the underpinnings of all we hold near and dear."

"Only here in this part of the universe, on Earth, is there known to be a place naturally blessed with abundant, liquid water. Not only is this the singular place with an ocean of salt water, but even more significant, it is an ocean that is filled with life that in turn, during some four billion years, has shaped the basic rocks and water of the planet into a strikingly different kind of place, a place unlike any known to exist anywhere else."

"Common sense forces me to consider first the incredible sweep of time that preceded this moment and the ocean's great age, relative to the infinitesimally small fragment of time enjoyed thus far by humankind."

"I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet. (Chuckles) Did I say that? I guess I did."

"The ocean is, in effect, our life-support system, driving and weather, governing the , stabilizing , generating most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, taking up much of the , shaping . If the ocean is in trouble, so are we."

"The ocean is large and resilient, but it is not too big to fail. What we are taking out of the sea, what we are putting into the sea are actions that are undermining the most important thing the ocean delivers to humankind – our very existence."

"No ocean, no life. No blue, no green. No ocean, no us."

"People ask: Why should I care about the ocean? Because the ocean is the cornerstone of earth's life support system, it shapes climate and weather. It holds most of life on earth. 97% of earth's water is there. It's the blue heart of the planet — we should take care of our heart. It's what makes life possible for us. We still have a really good chance to make things better than they are. They won't get better unless we take the action and inspire others to do the same thing. No one is without power. Everybody has the capacity to do something."

"In the rush to "develop" and use the legacy 4.6 billion years in the making, we have struck the earth like a slow-motion comet, wielding powerful new forces of change, rivaling and compounding the impact of natural storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, disease, fires-even, it now seems, nudging the grand and gradual planetary processes that cause ice ages to come and go."

"There’s heaven on earth. It just happens to be in the ocean."

"The next time you dine on sushi -- or sashimi, or swordfish steak, or shrimp cocktail, whatever wildlife you happen to enjoy from the ocean -- think of the real cost. For every pound that goes to market, more than 10 pounds, even 100 pounds, may be thrown away as bycatch. This is the consequence of not knowing that there are limits to what we can take out of the sea."

"Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us, protecting special critical areas in the ocean."

"To say that Rousseau's contemporaries were aware of the paradoxes in his writing would be putting it mildly. It was the constant theme of reviewers, from his first publications in the early 1750s to his posthumous works, which came out in the 1780s. The usual line was that his compelling prose style veiled the hollowness of his paradoxes and that other writers, notably Voltaire, were much deeper thinkers. Rousseau himself was well aware of these criticisms, but the impulse behind all of his work was a determination to confront the contradictions that seem inseparable from our experience. It is easy to think up theories that get rid of contradictions, but not so easy to get rid of the contradictions themselves. Since his time, two centuries of further reflection have of course brought new ways of answering his questions. As Jean Starobinski has said, "It took Kant to think Rousseau's thoughts, and Freud to think Rousseau's feelings." But the questions remain as important as ever, and Freud himself stands directly in the line that leads from Rousseau. As for Voltaire, it seems obvious today that he was a witty and prolific popularizer whose ideas were largely derivative. It was Rousseau who was the most original genius of his age—so original that most people at the time could not begin to appreciate how powerful his thinking was."

"The heart of Rousseau's thinking, as Arthur Melzer and others have shown, is to honor modern individualism but at the same time to subject it to a devastating critique."

"His comment about a book whose author claimed was channeled from the spirit of William James, the great American psychologist and philosopher: "If the vapid writings . . . did indeed emanate from him, I can only say that this implies a terrible post-mortem reduction of personal capacities. (Survival of death with such an appalling decay of personality makes it, at least to me, a rather unattractive prospect.)""

"Neoliberalism is an ideology that reduces all values to money values. The worth of a thing is the price of the thing. The worth of a person is the wealth of the person. Neoliberalism tells you that you are valuable exclusively in terms of your activity in the marketplace."

"I have always had a fascination with traveling to magical places. Many of my own stories take place in other places, other dimensions. I guess I'm the ultimate escapist."

"In the long run, any attempt to reduce the complexity of the relations among the sacred, the properly secular, and the profane is doomed to failure, although each such effort can cause great human hardship in the short run. But in both the short and the long run, the Church, or the synagogue, or the mosque or the temple, is where you go when you want to be connected to the One who relates to everyone and every people. If the Church is where one goes to be truly free, how does the Church contribute to our understanding of who we are and what we should do in the activities that shape the world we live in, that fill the theater of secularity?"

"When it comes to abortion, euthanasia, and other sanctity of life issues, we should not suppose that our choice is between reforming the law and working to change the culture. We must do both. The work of legal reform is necessary, though not sufficient, ingredient in the larger project of cultural transformation. Yes, we must change people's hearts. But no, we must not wait for changes of heart before changing the laws. We must do both at the same time, recognizing that just laws help to form good hearts, and unjust laws impede every other effort in the cause of the Gospel of Life."

"Jesus doesn’t talk about being conservative or being liberal. He talks about knowing the truth or living in darkness. It is true and false that define our internal dynamics and not politics or law directly."

"The workers saw themselves first as persons deserving of respect, and people demand respect more than they demand wages."

"Belief in God's presence and action in American public life, in social events, in education, in civic celebrations and political discussions, which for two hundred years had been considered broadly beneficent, changed radically on September 11, 2001."

"Since life is a gift from God, it does not have to be strong and independent in order to be valuable. A human being in a civilized society does not have to be 'wanted' by anyone in order to merit legal protection."

"I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.""

"Some have recently argued that pluralism by its very nature demands civic secularism. There seems to be no logical reason why respect for the beliefs of more than a quarter billion Americans, 90 percent of whom declare themselves to be religious, should require us now to eschew the public expression of religion, even in discussing political affairs that have moral foundations or implications."

"It's hard to discover that you're hated."

"There are only two kinds of arguments for euthanasia. The first is based on owning your life. Already in the last century, some philosophers and novelists began to talk of suicide as the ultimate act of self-control or self-possession. That is, of course, an illusion, for death is the surrender of all control or possession; and killing oneself is always an act of despair. It means a person has given up all hope. The second kind of argument is based on escaping from suffering. In actual fact, pain control is so far advanced now that suffering can be alleviated in almost all cases. The fear of suffering, however, creates a strong case for accepting a “right to die”. Right or no right, we will all die. The basic question, therefore, is always: since I must die, what is the meaning of life?"

"I was gazing toward the Circus Maximus, toward the Palatine Hill where the Roman emperors once resided and reigned and looked down upon the persecution of Christians, and I thought, ‘Where are their successors? Where is the successor of Caesar Augustus? Where is the successor of Marcus Aurelius? And finally, who cares? But if you want to see the successor of Peter, he is right next to me, smiling and waving at the crowds."

"Seeking an English equivalent for peinture relative, Fritz Glarner settled on the term 'relational painting' towards the end of 1946, which he applied retrospectively to some of his earlier paintings and all his subsequent works. It was a term that suited the kind of abstract painting he pursued, focused on relating geometric shapes and ground through colour in ways which would make shape and ground alternate to produce what he called 'pumping planes'. While acknowledging the influence of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), with whom he was closely associated in New York, Glarner replaced the balancing of horizontality and verticality achieved in Mondrian's painting with interlocking rectangles and wedges that expand out towards the edges of the canvas."

"When thoroughly reliable people encounter ghosts, their stories are difficult to explain away."

"A good yarn, an offbeat tale, a bloodcurdling ghost story -- they need no explanation or excuse for the telling!"

"In writing Newton's biography, I have attempted, in accordance with my understanding of biography as a literary form, to avoid composing an essay on Newtonian science. At the same time I have sought to make Newton the scientist the central character of my drama."

"Early in April, an international community of sustainability theorists and practitioners gathered in New York City at a special High Level Meeting at the United Nations... the larger purpose of the meeting was to articulate the elements of a new economic paradigm, and to issue a call to world leaders to adopt its fundamental precepts."

"Creative destruction can apply to economic concepts as well. And this downturn offers an excellent opportunity to get rid of one that has long outlived its usefulness: gross domestic product. G.D.P. is one measure of national income, of how much wealth Americans make, and it’s a deeply foolish indicator of how the economy is doing. It ought to join buggy."

"THE TERM (Sustainability) HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. “Sustainable” has been used variously to mean “politically feasible,” “economically feasible,” “not part of a pyramid or bubble,” “socially enlightened,” “consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,” “consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,” “morally desirable,” and, at its most diffuse, “sensibly far-sighted.”"

"We should be very careful to distinguish between our knowledge of phenomena and our interpretations of them."

"[…] the virtues of a medicine depend less upon its intrinsic properties and powers than on the sagacity of the physician who administers it; just as the efficiency of firearms depends less upon the explosives and the missile they contain than on the judgment and accuracy of aim of the man who discharges them."

"Dinosaurs seem strange, but that is just because we are mammals biased toward assuming the modern fauna is familiar and normal, and past forms are exotic and alien. Consider that elephants are bizarre creatures with their combination of big brains, massive limbs, oversized ears, teeth turned into tusks, and noses elongated into hose-like trunks. Nor were dinosaurs part of an evolutionary progression that was necessary to set the stage for mammals culminating into humans. What dinosaurs do show is a parallel world, one in which mammals were permanently subsidiary, whereas the dinosaurs show what largely diurnal land animals that evolved straight from similarly day-loving ancestors should actually look like. Modern mammals are much more peculiar, having evolved from nocturnal beasts that came into their own only after the entire elimination of nonavian dinosaurs. While dinosaurs dominated the land, small nocturnal mammals were just as abundant and diverse as they are in our modern world. If not for the accident of the later even, dinosaurs would probably still be the global norm."

"When it was assumed that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, it was correspondingly presumed that their flight evolved among climbers that first glided and then developed powered flight. This has the advantage that we know that arboreal animals can evolve powered flight with the aid of gravity, as per bats. When it was realized that birds descended from deinonychosaurs, many researchers switched to the hypothesis that running dinosaurs learned to fly from the ground up. This has the disadvantage that it is not certain whether it is practical for tetrapod flight to evolve among ground runners working against gravity. The characteristics of birds indicate that they evolved from dinosaurs that had first evolved as bipedal runners, and then evolved into long armed climbers. If the ancestors of birds had been entirely arboreal, then they should be semiquadrupedal forms whose sprawling legs were integrated into the main airfoil, like bats. That birds are bipeds whose erect legs are separate from the wings indicates that their ancestors evolved to run."

"The culmination of tyrannosaur evolution, T. rex was one of the very last North American dinosaurs. Nothing else combined its size, speed, and power. Since its demise we have had to make do with lions and tigers and bears, and other "little" mammalian carnivores."

"[Velociraptors] are among my very favourite dinosaurs. Their long upcurved skulls, slender yet compact proportions, and great sickle claws make these elegant, attractive, yet demonic animals. There is nothing else like them. Pound for pound, these are among the most powerful of known predators; certainly no other theropod had such a combination of foot, hand, and head weaponry... Among theropods only Tyrannosaurus, with its extreme skull strength, equalled Velociraptor in total power relative to weight."

"Put a leopard and a [Deinonychus] together and the former would be in trouble."

"This is the theropod. Indeed, excepting perhaps Brontosaurus, this is the public's favourite dinosaur, having fought King Kong for the forced favor of Fay Wray and smashed Tokyo (with inferior special effects) in the guise of Godzilla."

"By the Cretaceous crocodilians of essentially modern form were the theropods [sic] main competitors. Yet crocodilians appear to be less abundant in most Mesozoic deposits than they are later in the mammal-dominated Cenozoic. Not only that, but they tended to be small-bodied: few specimens were as big as American alligators or Nile crocodiles. It is possible that theropods were eating the crocs. Even today, big cats once in a while kill a fairly large crocodilian. A tyrannosaur could have swallowed one whole, and gone into the water after them. Constant attacks could have suppressed croc populations, and favored the smaller, harder to catch species."

"When one reads about Tyrannosaurus and Brontosaurus, one is not dealing with species, like lions or African elephants. Instead, these are genera, a group of animal species. For example, the lion is in the genus Panthera. Species of Panthera include the lion Panthera leo, the tiger P. tigris, and the leopard P. pardus, among others. So saying Tyrannosaurus is much like saying "the big cats"."