All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart.

True respect means taking other people's beliefs seriously and assuming they are adult and intelligent enough to be able to cope with it if you tell them, clearly and civility, why you think they are totally, utterly and disastrously wrong.

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

True Americanism is opposed utterly to any political divisions resting on race and religion.

I am utterly struck how, 300 years after his execution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The allegations against Harvey Weinstein are clearly deplorable. No matter how many great films he's bullied into production, or his guilt-induced contributions to left-minded ideals, this kind of intimidation and abuse of power is perverse and utterly unforgivable. Period.

Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it. A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.

In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.

Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there's poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?

The perfect ham and cheese sandwich is all about focusing on quality ingredients and about simple techniques. You start with great bread, a well-cured ham and a sharp local cheese, and the rest is easy. A little butter in a pan and a little patience - in the end you'll have a sandwich that is at once comforting and delicious.

To make a full-blooded puff pastry, you need time, you need patience, and you need precision. It's all about the lamination: it's all about building up the layers of butter, dough, butter, dough; as the butter melts, it creates steam, and that brings up the layers of the two doughs apart from each other, and that's what gives it the rise.

You hear so much awful stuff before you have a kid, like you'll never sleep again, we always knew it would be utter garbage. We're pretty relaxed people, the less stressed you are the more easy you'll find parenting.

The challenging part of parenting for me is to make sure that an individual person is an individual and not some sort of cookie-cutter version of me. At the same time, I want to make sure that I impart my sense of the world as an adult.

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

What's a butterfly garden without butterflies?

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.