The war and terrorism in the Middle East, the crisis of leadership in many of the oil-supply countries in the developing world, the crisis of global warming - all these are very clearly tied to energy.
I have an unconscious burglar living in my mind: If I read something, it's mine. I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.
Democrats have laid out a program that, if adopted, would make us independent of Middle Eastern oil in ten years, and create a new economy especially for those in rural America. Our program invests in clean energy alternatives and provides energy assistance for those in need.
There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.
Americans like buying American vs. buying from Chavez or buying from the Middle East.
Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.
Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.
What is hard to remember when you're in the middle of it is that when you get through to the other side, you always walk away with a gift. If you can stand in there and not walk away from it, you get transformed by it.
I think I was a behavior problem, mostly, but in a fun way. I tried to tell jokes. I was the middle kid, so I was always looking for attention and trying to be the one that equalized everything.
I like to be alone so I can write. But focus can hurt you. I don't want to be some stress casualty in early middle age.
There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos.
I write screenplays in the middle of the night.
If you're middle aged... where're you going to go to meet someone? You're not going to go to a bar, you're not going to go to a night club; and there are the museums.
In my standup work, I always do these characters, older people who are just off to the side. It's easier to write a story about the guy who made it to the top, but the middle is so much more interesting, so much more murky.
You have to look at the history of the Middle East in particular. It has been one of failure and frustration, of feudalism and tribalism.
We penalize and suspend players for making contact with the head while checking, in an effort to reduce head injuries, yet we still allow fighting. We're stuck in the middle and need to decide what kind of sport do we want to be. Either anything goes and we accept the consequences, or take the next step and eliminate fighting.
Inspired by Alex Haley's 'Roots,' at the age of 11 I began a handwritten Middle Passage story called 'Lawdy, Lawdy, Make Us Free.' I was raised by civil rights activists with a very strong sense of racial history and consciousness.
Racism has always existed, and a big part of it is people just not knowing others. I think humans change other human's minds, and it's hard for someone in the middle of America to hate Syrian refugees if they've been able to befriend them.
Those who know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the conception that the earth remains at rest in the middle of the heavens as its center, would, I reflected, regard it as an insane pronouncement if I made the opposite assertion that the earth moves.
In the States everyone aspires to be middle class. It's so engrained into the American psyche: As long as you work hard you're going to be rich some day. The history of Britain is that if you're born working class, you're going to stay there, although that is changing.
Not surprisingly, my parents' generation did everything they could to make life easier for their own children. Was that good for us? I wonder. It certainly didn't do us any good from a cultural point of view. I'm struck by how few boomers have embraced adult culture in middle age.
What is the one country in the Middle East that has not been attacked by ISIS? One. That is Iran. That is more than happenstance, I'm sure.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that's shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.
Second, there are so many magical places in books that you can't go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.
We can't have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don't mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.
I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion.
My father described this tall lady who stands in the middle of the New York harbor, holding high a torch to welcome people seeking freedom in America. I instantly fell in love.
I've decided to run for the U.S. Senate because I believe Wisconsin families need a senator who will work hard to deliver results for the middle class - a leader with the courage to do what's right, no matter how tough the odds or how powerful the special interests we have to fight.
With my friends in Brooklyn, many of them started out as artists. I saw many of these friends move into late middle age, still struggling without health insurance or a cushion. I saw people who had given up being artists. Being an artist necessitates a compromise or living on the edge.
We woke up one day, and all the sudden Starbucks was in the middle of this political crossfire between the people who want to bring a gun into Starbucks and the people who want to prevent it. It is a very difficult, fragile situation.
I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.
I have tremendous faith in theuniverse. I feel at home on this planet. Even though it's a very big world out there, I plan on walking right through the middle of it unharmed.
I was brought up in a very open, rural countryside in the middle of nowhere. There were no cell phones. If your lights went out, you were lit by candlelight for a good four days before they can get to you. And so, my imagination was crazy.
To reward work, to grow the middle class and strengthen the economy, to give millions of Americans the respect they deserve... It's time to raise the minimum wage.
When I sat in rooms with middle-aged white men, I heard them speaking like young black men in America. They had been solidly middle class for the majority of their working careers, but now they were feeling angry, disaffected, and in some cases, they actually had tears in their eyes.
