“As long as we rationalize nuclear weapons as “necessary” in order to save American lives, then nuclear weapons will never be gotten rid of.”

Do as much as possible for the patient, and as little as possible to the patient.

We physicians have focused on the nuclear threat as the singular issue of our era. We are not indifferent to other human rights and hard-won civil liberties.

The International Declaration of Human Rights says the right to housing, health, education should be guaranteed to everyone.

We must convince each generation that they are but transient passengers on this planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity’s past nor dim its future.

Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real.

Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem Darkness.

I see nuclear weapons as the ultimate evil, not just evil, but the ultimate evil with the potential to make life unlivable on this planet.

But first we must be able to bequeath to our children the most fundamental of all rights, which preconditions all others; the right to survival.

Nuclear bombs have made mass murder a reality. Nuclear bombs threaten humankind.

Some of life’s biggest and most positive changes are propelled by mini conspiracies of a few well-meaning folks.

The security provided by a long-held belief system, even when poorly founded, is a strong impediment to progress.

Once a new paradigm takes hold, its acceptance is extraordinarily rapid and one finds few who claim to have adhered to a discarded method.

General acceptance of a practice becomes the proof of its validity, though it lacks all other merit.

The moment these things are provided, we will have a different world order and nuclear weapons will become less of a threat.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World.

Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about “welfare mothers” – a code phrase for people of colour.

A long December and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last.

I usually know the general emotion of a song, or the general feeling of it, and then I think I just get so excited by the act of recording. I love that process so much that I feel like if

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…

Really, as long as I am working and have diversity, I am happy.

People have been talking about multiverses as a philosophical idea for a long time. But the current incarnations in physics