Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.

The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind's music, medicine and knowledge.

Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself.

Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud.

Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.

Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.

Singing with others is an unmediated, shared experience as each person feels the same music reverberating in their individual bodies. Singing is part of our humanity; it is embodied empathy.

Clock measurement is not time itself. In fact, so opposed are they that one could argue the clock is not a synonym, but the opposite of time.

A wild creature is not subject to any will except its own

As a writer you have a duty to be a messenger.

Why wait for your happiness to come from your future blessings, when this moment already has all you need to live happily?

Beware of anything to do with President Obama...I speak from experience.

don’t order me around like that unless it involves a safe word and a couple of interesting toys.

Shouldn't you be asking for my name first?

For some days, people thought that India was shaking. But there are always tremors when a great tree falls.

I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.

If I were as good at praying as I am at not praying I'd be really holy.

Most choices are driven by immediate results.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

The essence of professionalism is the focus upon the work and its demands, while we are doing it, to the exclusion of all else.