“The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country’s injustices and contradictions down on paper.”

No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush’s Iraq War.

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.

And he learned a great deal from it about the strengths and weaknesses of these different weapons.

Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.

If your real wages are declining, your job is at risk, you fear your children will be worse off than you are

Compared with how we’ve ducked it in the United States, Canada should be really proud of how you have welcomed a significant number of refugees – far more, in fact, than we Americans have, even though our population is vastly larger.

Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the cemeteries of France and Belgium

Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.

And American soldiers were the victims of these things in Spain, American volunteers. So this war was really a testing ground for Hitler.

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.

You’ve got politicians in power or vying for power who are taking tactics and elements of their appeal from the playbook of fascism.

Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes.

Leopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history.

Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about “welfare mothers” – a code phrase for people of colour.

In Canada, the U.S. and most of Europe it may be easy to take political stands, this is something for which you can be forced to pay with your life, or your freedom, in many other parts of the world, from Iran to Russia to Pakistan to China.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

Everything that we believe in and count on is really in question right now. Our safety net, public education, housing, health care.

What counts in the end is what the government does.

Prosperity is as short-lived as a wildflower, so don’t ever count on it.

Next time you think of beautiful things, don’t forget to count yourself in.

You were the one who made things different, you were the one who took me in. You were the one thing I could count on, above all, you were my friend.

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.