Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system.

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can't afford the time to think.

The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

If you want to control a population... give them a God to worship.

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

Every once in a while, people need to be in the presence of things that are really far away.

There were more than a dozen extinction level events before even the dinosaurs got theirs!

To take those fools in clerical garb seriously is to show them too much honor.

I didn't need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.

If you wish to understand a philosopher, do not ask what he says, but find out what he wants

As far as I'm concerned, leopard is a neutral.

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.

The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.

I know that I know nothing.