Isn't it interesting that eating a banana is somehow comical.

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.

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

The eternal sea of politics is best left to politicians.

The fairies, as their custom, clapped their hands with delight over their cleverness, and they were so madly in love with the little house that they could not bear to think they had finished it.

You rented the apartment with a dead guy in the corner?” I shrugged. “I wanted the apartment, and I figured I could cover him up with a bookcase or something.

Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.

When we numb [hard feelings], we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness.

We don't care what the framers would have thought of violent video games. Times are changing.

Revolutions are not made with literature. Revolutions equal gunfire.

God has given me a lot of ability to play the game of baseball.

The stuff I'm working on is quite dense. I'm seeing every four bars as a scene in a film.