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.

Welsh is now almost a national language in Wales. The Scottish dialects are reviving to some extent. I don't think it's a major thing, but it's there, and it's happening elsewhere.

Maybe the science is uncertain, maybe we don't have to worry about it. Climate change is the worst, but there's others.

You can't get votes that way. So [the Republicans] have been compelled to mobilize a base of voters and gone to elements of the country that have always been there but were kind of marginal to the political system, for example, religious extremists.

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."

The idea that you have to drop any thing that you might be interested in doing because you have to pass that test tomorrow and it's something that you're not interested in, that's just the opposite of education. It's also harming teaching, because the teachers are evaluated by the results of the test.

Where are the drug cartels getting their weapons? They are being provided by the United States. Cut off that flow of arms.