Life is a planetary level phenomenon and the Earth has been alive for at least 3000 million years. To me the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable—the rhetoric of the...

A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his...

That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt.

Human history is one prolonged and painful limping. We invariably step with one foot on the rock of justice, and with the other, we sink into the mire of deceit and self-delusion.

Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.

We are quiet, contemplative people, and our behaviour in the field is relatively aristocratic. Running is not necessarily beneath our dignity but it is in any case pointless because the flies move much too fast....

Humans see what they want to see.

One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance ‘do the right...

Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments without difficulty.

We all know dogmatists who are more concerned about holding their opinions than about investigating their truth. … if they are mistaken, they will never discover it; they have condemned themselves to perpetual error. Human...

It’s funny, in a human kind of way, how we can convinces ourselves that we’re in control at the very moment we are beginning to lose it.

If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.

Too many companies— and individuals— are befuddled by delusion when it comes to identifying their authentic strengths and projecting those strengths through their brand. It’s as if they live in Opposite Land. If their service...

Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

Every society produces its own cultural conceits, a set of lies and delusions about itself that thrive in the face of all contrary evidence.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”[Modernism’s Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]

The…act of surrender—or devotion, as the case may be—was, to him, a kind of lifeline for those who sought a quick answer and didn’t want to stick around long enough to see their doubt through...

I live in my mind, such that whatever destroys me shall be a creature of my own invention.

I thought these grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.

Mom has the Touch. She knows what flowers go with what occasions, what hors d’oeuvres work with what people. She believes passionately in the power of food to heal, restore, and stimulate relationships, and she...

Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to ‘show’ it to me because as soon...

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review ‘the chronicles of wasted...

Deanna’s job (as counselor) is to keep us from deluding ourselves.