The time to be political is not when you have parties and carnivals, it's kind of a show, the election. It affects something but not that much. And focusing all the attention on it is I think a mistake.

State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars — they would think the country has gone insane.

I did not say that language as a completed system emerged in an individual in an instant. But I cannot think of a coherent alternative to the idea that mutations take place in individuals, not communities, so that whatever rewiring of the brain yielded the apparently unique properties of language, specifically recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions, would therefore have taken place in an individual, and only later been used among individuals who had inherited this capacity.

I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.

The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.