The reason academic disputes are so vicious is that so little is at stake.

Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.

When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.

I don't like piracy but if anybody's concerned about piracy, why don't they pay attention to our role in it?

I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation; plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.

The Second World War had really devastating effects for much of Europe. It really didn't take them very long to reconstruct state capitalist democracies because it was in people's heads. There were other parts of the world that were pretty much devastated and they couldn't do it; they didn't have the conceptions in their mind. A lot of it is human consciousness.

The missile defense component is a minor feature that nobody takes very seriously. Nobody really believes that the US is trying to protect itself from North Korea. That's not serious. But the militarization of space is quite serious.