Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. ...[T]ruth is one of the things that separates us from an .... - Michiko Kakutani

I liken the attacks on science to turning off the headlights,” he said. “We’re driving fast and people don’t want to see what’s coming up. Scientists — we’re the headlights.

I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.