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It's important to be precise about words, because of the thought value of them-they frame and shape so much of the way we understand things.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

There's lots about politics I don't feel comfortable with. To talk about the politics of future ideas is impossible in soundbite form.

I know that sometimes politics creates situations in which people want to say particular things for political reasons.

Public opinion shapes our destinies and guides the progress of human affairs.

Words outlive people, institutions, civilizations. Words spur images, associations, memories, inspirations and synapse pulsations. Words send off physical resonations of thought into the nethersphere. Words hurt, soothe, inspire, demean, demand, incite, pacify, teach, romance, pervert, unite, divide. Words be powerful.

What we call politics now and what most political writers write about is the empathy and the bonding and the word choice and the horse rights, and it has nothing to do with what's really happening to people's lives.

That's the thing about business. Facts and numbers and results actually count. It's not just about words as it is in politics.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.