When a politician uses the word 'folks,' we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven - that's none of my business, ultimately. I won't lecture her on the philosophy of science.

It seems as if everybody in the country was getting impatient to get his or her particular soldier out of the Army and to upset the carefully arranged system of points for retirement which we had arranged with the approval of the Army itself.

Gender used to be a barrier for women to overcome if they wanted to be in politics, but today in Taiwan the situation is somewhat different. I think there is even a preference for a woman candidate, and in local elections, we have seen that younger, better-educated female candidates are overwhelmingly preferred by the voters.

Winning and losing have their significance in a democracy. But there should be no arrogance in victory, nor should there be any despondency in defeat.

There's a lot of politics in football, and sometimes the real values of the sport, those human values, get lost.