The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.

If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.

By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors.

Saudi Arabia is a puritanical state that claims a monopoly of wisdom and virtue.

Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.

A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.

Since the attack on the United States on September 11 2001, and the US retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, there must be few people who have not felt a twinge of nostalgia for the cold war.

Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.

Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they're fine fellows and don't need to explain themselves.

To find the universal elements enough

Self-publishing a shitty book doesn't make you an author any more than singing in the shower makes you a rockstar or squeezing your pimple makes you a dermatologist.

When you star arises, your cloud of opposition awakens

Computer Science is a science of abstraction -creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.

it was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.

The 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come 'in a thousand years' it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere.

What I didn't do was pick one thing and keep saying it over and over again, so I could have gotten credit for it.

I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you're an integrated congregation? It doesn't happen.

Sports teaches you very important lessons that are many and varied. It's probably the closest thing to the lessons we learned in fighting and warfare, about loyalty and growing up.

A fad lives its life in a few weeks; a philosophy lives through generations and centuries; a principle, forever.