The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.

Technologies can be liberating, but it can also be a tool of coercion and control.

Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language.

Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn't communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it's been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it's over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas.

Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can't deal with them... But it's a complicated matter: Science studies what's at the edge of understanding, and what's at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.

As a health scientist at Columbia University, Les Roberts, pointed out, sooner or later people are going to be looking at a child in a wheelchair suffering from polio and will say 'the Americans did that to him'. So they continue policies which have similar effects i.e. organising the Taliban. This will come back to them too.