“I’m after a snake and please God I’ll scotch it.”

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor

Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.

One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game.

To bring us this vivid, searing account of the wide network of human trafficking and servitude which spans today’s globe.

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.

Dad, it’s been an up-and-down road for all of us, but you’ve always been there supporting from afar, texting me Bible verses every single day, telling me you love me every single day. That builds me up and I thank you so much. I love you. I’m just glad you’re part of this journey with us.

What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon.

After I got that hit off Satchel (Paige), I knew I was ready for the big leagues.

After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.

Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.

Time is change; we measure its passage by how much things alter.

I motivate others by making sure that they understand to go after their dreams and dont let anyone tell you you cant. If you are motivated enough and put the work in that you can achieve anything in life that you set your mind to.

Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?