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

No international court can ever substitute for a working national justice system. Or for a society at piece.

All over Budapest, statues have been replaced, museum exhibits have been redone, to turn ethnic Hungarians, not Jews, into the prime victims of the Germans during World War II.

In his fierce, bold determination to see the lives of modern-day slaves up close, Benjamin Skinner reminds me of the British abolitionist of two hundred years ago

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.

Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?

Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings

Many of the principle weapons that the Nazis used during World War II had their first trial in combat in Spain

I can certainly sympathize with writers who don’t want to put themselves or their loved ones at risk.

So people at the time really saw fascism not just as an evil but as an aggressive evil that seemed to be spreading.

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

You can sense the vast inequalities of Tsarist Russia in [Anton] Chekhov and [Lev] Tolstoy.

Because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.

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

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

Its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.

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

This complexity is what creates that which we all know – the World – is connected in a system of networks – and I’m not referring only to the internet but also to thousands of analog networks in which we are all immersed at every instant.

All we really want in the end is to be connected once again with the Truth of our being, to realize what it is that wears this mask of self.

Love causes us to be deeply connected in an unspoken way. It happens when we’re really available, really open.

The piano and the singing are two equal things to me – maybe not inseparable but very connected. You can say they are like two equal voices.

How many times have you prayed or asked or said you needed help, when suddenly somebody showed up in your life? We are all connected through our thoughts.

You have 37.2 trillion cells in your body. There is vastness outside you and vastness inside you. You are connected to this mystery, you are a microcosm of the universe, and every aspect of your life benefits from the universe’s provision.

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.

Like ‘naive,’ ‘impulsive’ and ‘way too connected online,’ are all things we can turn into strengths to help us.