Take the year a country first reaches 50% literacy and add one or two generations to allow the idea to sink in and, democracy, more or less automatically, appears.

It doesn't matter what we think we are there [in Afghanistan] for; it matters what they think. They think we are invaders.

Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. (Do the right thing even if the heavens fall.) It's not nearly as naïve a maxim as it seems, because in the real world it often turns out that doing what is morally the right thing is also, in practical terms, the right thing to do.

But we are almost certainly going to miss our [global warming] deadline. We cannot get the 10 lost years back, and by the time a new global agreement to replace the Kyoto accord is negotiated and put into effect, there will probably not be enough time left to stop the warming short of the point where we must not go.

As the most religious country of the 18 surveyed, the U.S. also comes in with the highest rates for teen pregnancy and for gonorrhea and syphilis.

The scientists are really scared. Their [global warming] observations over the past two or three years suggest that everything is happening a lot faster than their climate models predicted.

Take the year a country first reaches 50% literacy and add one or two generations to allow the idea to sink in and, democracy, more or less automatically, appears.