It's a principle that anything our leaders do is for noble reasons. It may be mistaken, it may be ugly, but basically noble. And if you bring in normal moderate, conservative, strategic, economic objectives you threatening that principle.

People have no human rights, only the rights that they can gain on the labour market. Above all, wealth and power have to be protected.

Take, say, the solidarity movement in Central America, which I think is what you probably had in mind. To a large extent, it comes out of mainstream Christianity, based on beliefs that have had outrageous human consequences in the past, and that I think are totally indefensible. In this case, they happen to lead to some of the most courageous, heroic, and honourable human action that's taking place anywhere in the world. Well, that's how life is, I guess. It doesn't come in neat little packages.

A more appropriate expansion is the statement "it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies" a transcript of a talk to a writers conference in Australia in 1996, where I had been asked to talk on "writers and intellectual responsibility" - a question that I said I found "puzzling," because I knew of nothing to say about it beyond truisms, though these were perhaps worth affirming because they are "so commonly denied, if not in words, then in consistent practice."

In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.

Those who wish to change the world should have the best possible understanding of the world, including what is revealed by the sciences, some of which they might be able to use for their purposes. That's why workers education, including science and mathematics, has commonly been a concern of left intellectuals.

It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.