The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.
This idea that once you get into politics... you are now signed up for lifelong duty being in elective office, makes a fundamental error - and that is believing that the only way you can hold progressive views and implement them is in elective office.
I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
It seems Russians hacked into emails from both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee and then chose to release only the DNC emails. These attacks destabilize and undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral process, and they must be addressed in a serious and proportional way - just as we would for a non-cyberattack.
Young voters are crucial. The trend over recent years has been for them to drift away. So anything that gets young voters interested in the electoral process not only has an immediate effect, but has an effect for years and years.
The only time we create any kind of substantive change is when we reach out to a disaffected electorate and inspire and motivate them to vote.
Self-government can succeed only through an instructed electorate.
You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for.
The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire - is that they're old, so we've ceased to notice their effects.
I was an electrician, and I started acting as a hobby because I needed a distraction - I was bored! And only when I started did I think, 'Sheesh, what have I gotten into?' I had to go after it fully; I just had to.
For under certain conditions the chemical atoms emit light waves of a specific length or oscillation frequency - their familiar characteristic spectra - and these can come in the form of electromagnetic waves only from accelerated electric quanta.
What the ultrafast laser does is that because it doesnβt have to just cut from the surface, itβs only at the intense focal point that it does this damage where the electrons come off the atoms, you could actually put your laser and scan it over your cornea and it would cut underneath that.
Crystallographers believed in X-ray results, which are of course very accurate. But the x-rays are limited, and electron microscopy filled the gap, and so the discovery of quasicrystals could have been discovered only by electron microscopy, and the community of crystallographers, for several years, was not willing to listen.
If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It's really only to be heard when everyone's out enjoying it.
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.
Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.
When I was in elementary school, we weren't allowed to do sports other than cheerleading. By junior high, they let us play, but we had to come back after 6:30 p.m. to practice because there was only one gymnasium and the boys used it first.
Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing.
Only passions, great passions can elevate the soul to great things.
My effort has been not only to put the Biblical incident in the original setting... but at the same time give the human touch to convey to my public the reverence and elevation these subjects impart to me.
