There's a very committed effort to convert the US into something resembling a Third World society, where a few people have enormous wealth and a lot of others have no security.

If there are lessons to be drawn from the sciences, then that should be the concern of everyone, including scientists to the extent that they can make a contribution.

What's called Obamacare is an effort to mildly change this [health-care system], not change it as far as it should go or as much as the population wants it to go, but to make it a little better and a little more affordable.

It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.

The most dramatic case is that of the Central Americans. Why are people fleeing Central America? It's because of the atrocities the U.S. committed there. Take Boston, where there's a fairly large Mayan population. These people are fleeing from the highlands of Guatemala, where there was virtual genocide in the early 1980s backed by Ronald Reagan. The region was devastated, and people are still fleeing to this day, yet they're sent back.

The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that's not just true of languages. It's true of every subject.

If humans are organisms like every other organism - which they are - then we should expect that if there are some domains where real scientific progress is possible, then there are others where it is not.