There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

In the 18th century James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

You just let your lower self go and then it takes on all these aspects of the society - the city with horns blowing the people yelling things at each other and the all-in-all violence and chaos of the city. Put that on stage with music and that's what this is.

We don't need sugar to live and we don't need it as a society.

We have a society in which one of the greatest things you can do is a platform to see victim status and one of the qualifications for that is that you have these exquisitely tender feelings about things and sensibilities which are easily offended.

I think the debate in our society now is that people have to agree on zero-tolerance to terrorism.

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.

I for one would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society.

Something's happened in our society which I don't think is beneficial and that's that you see the public being fed box-office news. Newscasts now every local station - I've been traveling around the country a lot and you see the local news and they give box-office reports.