My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.

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."

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Africa's a wreck and it's not because it was hit by an asteroid. It's a wreck largely because it was hit by Europe.

Surely few if any readers have come across the sentence they are now reading, and someone who had by chance heard or seen it could not possibly remember such a fact.

Stability means you do what we say, and what we say is that Colombia and the resources of the Andean region shall be freely available to the rich and powerful of the world, particularly US-based multinational corporations.