I don't feel that I have anything to say beyond moral truisms.

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.

We only serve God when we serve people

We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear, " he said. "Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.

When you’re with a girl, it’s always best to act like you’re an old hand at everything—not to impress her, but just to make sure she feels safe.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.

Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.

I'm always surprised to hear or read my work described, "In angry tones, she says." No! In truthful tones! Does truth have a tone? I don't know.

Life works best when we think of people as people.

You explain nothing, O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.