Individuals in a university - students, faculty, staff - can choose to become politically engaged, and a free university should foster a climate in which those are natural choices.

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.

Don't give yourself the opportunity to regret

Sometimes thinking isn't thinking, it's dreaming with eyes wide open.

Expectation wasn't just about what people expected of you. It was about what you expected of yourself.

Plant trees. They give us two of the most crucial elements for our survival: oxygen and books.

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

Throughout my teens, I just wanted to go somewhere I could wear a Donald Duck pin and no one would care.

I was reading Omar Khayyam, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, L. Ron Hubbard, all sorts of philosophy. Bebop cats are like that. Curious. I wanted to know about everything.

I went to public - I graduated from publics - Westchester High. I'm a product of LA Unified.

What's shaking, chiefy baby?

How long it takes to write a book depends on its length.