“If our dreams can last, then we could turn our time and place to gold.”

There is, it seems, an unbridgeable chasm between the concerns of a Sri Aurobindo and a Pat Robertson.

We have to learn how to contact one another over an enormous land space, across five-and-a-half time zones, in what as once a wilderness of scattered settlements, in what is now a sprawl of suburban edge cities and satellite towns. Technology forges connections and disconnections here.

Threaten the balances of justice and you threaten the potential enlargements of mind and soul. Therefore justice is part of the safeguarding of the heart.

Democracies should be a delirium of choices – more options, not fewer; more avenues to travel, not fewer.

No rebellious heart is ever at ease with paths established by others.

A just society will appear less spectacular, and less clearly defined, than a society with totalitarian leadership, theocratic goals.

Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.

Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole.

Canada is like several puzzles that we are all working on at the same time. Everyone has a part to add, but no one has seen the whole picture yet.

We remake the world through our technologies, and these in turn remake and extend us, in ever spiraling lattices of complexity. McLuhan uncannily foresaw the future, where electronic technology would shape and expand cultures and societies into a global membrane of communications.

If you make things sound inoffensively obvious, then it is likely that no one will listen.

Here I find a puzzle of great beauty: Canada works well in practice, but just doesn’t work out in theory.

The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be.

Charisma is a sign of the calling. Saints and pilgrims are defiantly moved by it.

The Trojan War without Homer was nothing more than a battle over trade routes.

The origin of corruption in politics is surely in the thought that you are the bearer of ultimate virtue.

It is hard, it lasts all day, the lighting is generally fluorescent, and, apparently, drinking at your desk is frowned upon.

It’s funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can’t even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of.

When life is good do not take it for granted as it will pass.

I have spent six years in prison, the last six years. Even if I was outside the prison, how much actual space was there for an investigative journalist to do his work in Iran?

You get an image after you act in a film, but it is not necessary that you last long because of that image.

The [China] government has improved in the last years. Of course, the structure is still the same; there’s still a one-party system and strong censorship.

One of the things I’ve really gotten past in the last couple of years is the idea of being made uncomfortable by the way things appear, rather than how things are.

Hey, Nana… people’s feelings change easily… what you see is a house of cards… nothing’s sure, and nothing lasts forever.