It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

Welcome...to Jurassic Park!

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification - framing the debate in terms which ignore the real issues.

Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

You think you can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. . . . . We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.

It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.

Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.

Social control is best managed through fear.

All that I know I learned after I was thirty.

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

You do a little more of a record album these days. See I just wanted to put a few songs in Beaches and we did very well. The album of Beaches went gold.

I write as the birds sing, because I must, and usually from the same source of inspiration.

We are a purely idealistic Nation but let no one confuse our idealism with weakness.

We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.

When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.

We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!