Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.

Around 2008 and again in 2013 NATO officially offered the Ukraine the opportunity to join NATO. That's something no Russian government is ever going to accept. It's right at the geopolitical heartland of Russia.

A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension - it becomes unconscious and reflexive - that you just don't think certain things, things that are threatening to power interests.

The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.

The reason I am a political radical is that I work on syntax. If I worked on semantics (which in fact I do), I'd be a good Thatcherite.

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.