Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

The great joy of doing 'The Daily Show' for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I'm playing the brown guy, and sometimes I'm not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.

Like other conflict-affected regions, Africa continues to see religious, ethnic, and politically motivated conflicts. Extremist violence is now entrenched in several parts of the world. Armed conflicts are leading to protracted refugee crises to the scale that has not been seen since World War II.

Putin wants nothing less than to return Russia to the center of global politics by challenging the primacy that the United States has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War.