Life is like a very short visit to a toyshop between birth and death.

Over the past 50 years we got versions of X-ray specs and space vacations and even death rays. But the X-ray specs don't fit on your face - they're big things that screen your luggage for guns. Space vacations are real but they cost $20 million. We have death rays but you have to be a triple Ph.D. to play with them.

It's normally the kiss of death to be identified as a rising star or someone to watch.

We burned to death 100 000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo - men women and children. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

And in a funny way each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up.

I am politically pro-choice but personally pro-life. I have my faith but refuse to force it on the world at large - especially this world so brutal and unjust. I cannot make these wrenching personal life and death decisions for others - nor do I believe they should be made by a church run by childless men.

We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more but the number is roughly constant and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.

The American people are not just being taxed to death they're being taxed after death. But no one should have to sell the life's work of a parent or a loved one just to pay the federal government.

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this and we have now to regard it from another side.

My death will be caused by morphine which I have deliberately taken with suicidal intent.