Younger people who are being indoctrinated into the contemporary system of falsification - they really have to do some research to find out what is the truth. In the general population, people forget or don't care that much. And gradually what you hear drilled into your head everyday comes to be believed. People don't understand what you're talking about any more if you discuss the American war on South Vietnam.

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

It is the worst atrocity underway [in Rwanda]. But it's barely in the media, and people just don't know about it. And that's quite generally true.

If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes.

When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: "Why do I care if my high school's team wins the football game? I don't know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me... why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense." But the point is, it does make sense: It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports.

One contribution scientists can and should make is to be clear and explicit about the limits of scientific understanding, a matter that is particularly important in societies where people are trained to defer to alleged experts.

It's true that language is in a sense linear but that is as obvious as perceptual space is three-dimensional.