History records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones; it also records painful reversals and setbacks.

There are very interesting books about these events, for instance one by a very well-known American historian named William R. Polk called Violent Politics. It's a record of what are basically guerrilla wars from the American Revolution right up through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I think the most important work that is going on has to do with the search for very general and abstract features of what is sometimes called universal grammar: general properties of language that reflect a kind of biological necessity rather than logical necessity; that is, properties of language that are not logically necessary for such a system but which are essential invariant properties of human language and are known without learning. We know these properties but we don't learn them. We simply use our knowledge of these properties as the basis for learning.

The people who live on the land - Israelis and Palestinians - have a right to live in security and peace.

Latin America is all moving to the left, from Venezuela to Argentina with rare exceptions, but there's a good left and a bad left.

Resource extraction impacts a global environment that is increasingly at severe risk.

The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa's major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.