Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.

The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.

IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

When we all part from this life and gather on the other side, the only thing each of us will have to share is his own story.

One of the things you discover about being president is that there are all these rules and norms and laws and you got to pay attention to them.

I wasn't willing to be a victim. I only wanted to survive, and I only wanted to get through.

To understand Afghanistan, you have to face the stress the average Afghan deals with.

I guess I am conscious of my weaknesses, and I think pacing is probably my biggest. I don't know if I think the clarity thing is actually a weakness. It was a stylistic choice.

I don't know how you would live in the world of Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston and being stalked. It's just brutal.

If you're a fish and you want to be a fish-stick, you have to have very good posture.

Lies, injustice, and hypocrisy are a part of every ordinary community. Most people achieve a sort of protective immunity, a kind of callousness, toward them. If they didn't, they couldn't endure.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

I have good hope that there is something after death.