Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself.

Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.

Singing with others is an unmediated, shared experience as each person feels the same music reverberating in their individual bodies. Singing is part of our humanity; it is embodied empathy.

Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.

Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.

A wild creature is not subject to any will except its own

The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind's music, medicine and knowledge.