I feared he'd go and take his silences with him, and take his secrets with him.

And then there was a silence one of those awful silences when you know something's wrong.

The absence of any reference to a commitment to end impunity or of any acknowledgement of the International Criminal Court's central contribution to this goal is one of several telling silences in our summit outcome.

The Alberta government and the oil companies that influence it would upgrade tar sands to oil sands, apparently thinking that a better name somehow silences environmental critics. Environmentalists opposing the pipeline refer, with equal deftness, to dirty oil.

But what my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps, that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition, that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero worshipping their own gurus.