Most people don't know what it's like to be poor, and to live in poverty. To live in a situation where everything around you - every opportunity is shut. You don't have anyone showing you how to rise above, you don't have any resources, and everyone around you is losing that battle too, then yeah, you want something that you have control over that makes you feel like you're running your brain for a minute.
Running for governor of Texas against a very popular governor [incumbent Ann Richards] was deemed to be risky. Everybody thought I would lose. As I put in my book, my mother said, "You're going to lose!"
Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.
The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.
I am the thread that runs through all these pearls, and each pearl is a religion or even a sect thereof. Such are the different pearls, and God is the thread that runs through all of them; most people, however, are entirely unconscious of it.
Unprecedented warnings by officials most closely linked with nuclear arms negotiations and defense strategy indicate that we are running out of time. If we fail to act soon, the scars of a major nuclear disaster will mark our immediate and distant future.
The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.
Eyes are bold as lions,--roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages. They wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age or rank; they respect neither property nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another through them!
To run away from danger, instead of facing it, is to deny one's faith in man and God, even one's own self. It were better for one to drown oneself than live to declare such bankruptcy of faith.