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In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.

The usual cause of evil in the world is that at any given time half the people in the world are awake.

Every day we wake up, we have an opportunity to do some good, but there's so much bad that you have to navigate to get to the good.

In the 1970s in New York, everyone slept till noon. It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes by the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. The city seemed either frightening or risible to the rest of the nation.

People have good and bad days.

Sleep makes people calmer, more alert, less fearful - just plain happier, or so I see around me and in me. I am sure that if this great nation were to concentrate on getting more sleep, we would be a happier, more confident people, and that by itself would be a major achievement.

Life takes its path and sometimes there are people to blame. Of course there are bad people in this world. Good, bad, it happens unfortunately. But in a way I think if there was more focus on the good, more good would happen.

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep.

My father said there were two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers. The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep better.