“Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.”

It’s tempting to want to blame it all on an easily identifiable target: Muslims, immigrants, refugees, blacks, Jews.

All of us living in today’s world are facing an enormous crisis – arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced

Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend.

After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II?

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.

In the form of man-made global warming; one can’t be neutral at such a moment. It’s like claiming to be neutral if you’re living in Germany in 1933.

The Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane for example, the Stuka dive bomber, the 88 millimeter artillery piece, which could be used both for antiaircraft purposes and also shelling on the ground.

No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush’s Iraq War.

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.

And he learned a great deal from it about the strengths and weaknesses of these different weapons.

Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.

If your real wages are declining, your job is at risk, you fear your children will be worse off than you are

Compared with how we’ve ducked it in the United States, Canada should be really proud of how you have welcomed a significant number of refugees – far more, in fact, than we Americans have, even though our population is vastly larger.

Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the cemeteries of France and Belgium

Comparison is a distraction from our inner creativity.⁣

Stay addicted to your goals, not distractions.

Feed focus starves distraction.

By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination.

The distractions that stop us from our dreams need to be ignored.

Less stuff means less to clean, less to worry about, and less distraction & more savings.

The selfish mind is the distracted mind and the distracted mind is the easily oppressed mind.

I’m sorry I was distracted by my lack of giving a shit.