It's a mistake to suppose that capacities must evolve gradually. There are many known examples of sharp changes - slight genetic modification that yields substantial phenotypic effects, and much else.

If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people - along with despair about its future.

If North Korea doesn't have a deterrent, they will be wiped out.

The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can't go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who's sniffing cocaine.

The anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.

The IMF economists were doubtless shaken by the extreme failures of their prescriptions over many years, and by the collapse of the intellectual edifice of economic theory on which they were relying.