“The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.”

A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.

And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times.

I write with teenagers in mind.

In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.

I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.

The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name.

Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?

I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence.

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.

… from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.

In the end, living is defined by dying.

Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.

Indian culture is essentially much more of a we culture. It’s a communal culture where you do what’s best for the community – you procreate.

American women were frustrated in just the role of housewife – but they also managed to enlarge it. And they weren’t just housewives, they were community leaders.

I think the most pressing issue in our community is probably a generational divide.

They whose minds are least sensitive to calamity, and whose hands are most quick to meet it, are the greatest men and the greatest communities.

We know that there can never be any solid friendship between individuals, or union between communities that is worth the name, unless the parties be persuaded of each others honesty

Cinema has no boundaries, we all belong to the same artistic community.

The advertisements in a newspaper are more full knowledge in respect to what is going on in a state or community than the editorial columns are.

I grew up in an artists community in New York, in a building that was government-subsidised for artists. No one made any money, but they made art for the sake of art.