When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

A 1998 study was done in Hebrew by an Israeli scholar, Yosef Grodzinsky, and the English translation of the title is Good Human Material. That's what they wanted sent to Palestine for colonization and for the eventual conflict that took place some years later. These policies were somewhat complementary to the U.S. policy of pressuring England to allow Jews to go to Palestine, but not allowing them here. The British politician Ernest Bevin was quite bitter about it, asking, "if you want to save the Jews, why send them to Palestine when you don't admit them?"

This is a large part of the academic profession: to make up complex, subtle arguments that are childishly ridiculous but are enveloped in sufficient profundity that they take on a kind of plausibility.

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.

Since James Madison day (and long before), there have been constant struggles over "democratic governance".

Don't be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.

There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of "Anglo-Saxon Law." And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.