Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society. It's also extremely dangerous with all the weapons development. The two countries have already come close to nuclear confrontation twice and this could get worse. So dealing with the relationship with India is extremely important.

There are huge areas where the human mind is apparently incapable of forming sciences, or at least has not done so. There are other areas - so far, in fact, one area only [physics] - in which we have demonstrated the capacity for true scientific progress.

Markets also have a very bad psychological effect. They drive people to a conception of themselves and society in which you're only after your own good, not the good of others and that's extremely harmful.

In my experience at least, the large public universities do not fall behind in fostering creativity and independence; often the contrary.

When people denounced [former Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad for rejecting and criminalizing homosexuality, it should be remembered that was true of the United States until very recently. Women's rights were unheard of. Civil rights proponents were horribly treated, not just in the South. It was awful there, but pretty bad here. Environmental issues did not exist. Opposition to aggression was virtually zero. In fact, so little, that to this day, even scholarship mentions the Vietnam War as beginning in 1965.

Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It's something you have to find out for yourself.

When I wrote about the Spanish Civil War many years later, I used documents that I picked up when I was a child, as a lot hadn't been published (a lot more resources are available now).