I write with teenagers in mind.

Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.

The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kants idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, its an evolved machine that we carry with us.

The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.

A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.