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

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.

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.

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

Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well.

If I make a set of rules, then a guy goes out and steals an airplane. He comes back and says, ‘It wasn’t in the rules.’

I don’t travel by airplane. I mean that because when my wife, my kids and I travel on trains or boats, we meet a lot of people and we talk to them.

Airplanes are the most beautiful when they are in the air.

Airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.

If airplane safety videos have taught me anything, it’s that a mother puts her own mask on first.

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

Now and then I miss the excitement about being in the cockpit of an airplane and doing new things.