Democracy, in any rational form, also imposes conditions on majority rule. That's what the Bill of Rights is about, for example.

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.

For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.

Her words were like tinfoil

Wisdom Is The Principal Thing

We are as happy as we think we are.

We cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist.

The religion of the Indian is the last thing about him that the man of another race will ever understand.

It would be great to have Bach in one corner, Bessie Smith in another, John Lennon in another. That's what I'd ideally like. A studio of the dead.

His thoughts inhabit a different plane from those of ordinary men; the simplest interpretation of that is to call him crazy.

All one’s feeling goes into practicing exercises, many of which are set to music. Therefore, somehow dancing with boyfriends doesn’t attract me.

I went with my very being toward language.