The golden thread of reason that used to be stretched taut to mark the boundary between the known and the unknown is now routinely disrespected.

I have always been fascinated with those who try to look over the horizon and see things that are coming at us.

Americans have the right to have their medical decisions made by them and their doctors, and not by those bureaucrats sitting behind a computer screen hundreds of miles away.

There's an old African proverb that says "If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." We have to go far - quickly. And that means we have to quickly find a way to change the world's consciousness about exactly what we're facing, and why we have to work to solve it.

Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving: most of the scientists I spoke with assume we'll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade.

We now face the prospect of a kind of global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilization's relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction. More and more people of conscience are joining the effort to resist, but the time has come to make this struggle the central organizing principle of world civilizations.

A lot of people go straight from denial to despair without pausing in the middle and doing something about it.