“How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly and [John] Wordsworth”

It’s tempting to want to blame it all on an easily identifiable target: Muslims, immigrants, refugees, blacks, Jews.

All of us living in today’s world are facing an enormous crisis – arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced

Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend.

After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II?

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.

In the form of man-made global warming; one can’t be neutral at such a moment. It’s like claiming to be neutral if you’re living in Germany in 1933.

The Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane for example, the Stuka dive bomber, the 88 millimeter artillery piece, which could be used both for antiaircraft purposes and also shelling on the ground.

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

Primum non nocerum. (First do no harm)

I understand that, because there are so many musicians, you have to make artists into brands, but I sometimes feel like I have to be some kind of non-human icon in order for people to listen to my music.

For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization.

The nature of what we’re doing is something, which is by its very nature, is non-formulaic.

That’s to impact the non-believer and let them know through our actions and through our music and through our shows that there is hope, there is meaning, there is purpose in this life.

Non-trivial understanding of the financial sector, credit, and the banking system.

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

CEOs of top companies could probably use a dose of not-asking-for-raise behavior and less self-entitlement.