Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.

The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.

One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.

We've always had this experience that things take long, but I'm 100% convinced that our principles will in the end prevail. No one knew how the Cold War would end at the time, but it did end. This is within our living experience... I'm surprised at how fainthearted we sometimes are and how quickly we lose courage.

My grandfather was originally from the south of China before he emigrated to Malaysia pre-World War II. And I wanted to learn more about the history of the country of my ancestors. I knew I wanted a narrative set in contemporary Beijing. I was really interested in the effect of the rapid social and economic change on ordinary citizens in China.

I think people used to read 'War and Peace,' and now they don't; now they sit around with their tablets and watch 'Downton Abbey' and 'Breaking Bad' or whatever, and they want the things that they watch to be better so that they can feel better about themselves for watching it.

Certainly I have more in common with Bernie Sanders than differences. I think if you had to look for differences, you would find them in foreign policy, where my campaign is perhaps more critical - I would say definitely more critical - of funding for regimes like that of the Netanyahu government, which are clearly war criminals.