It is reported that about 30% of the world's population is unemployed. That's worse than the Great Depression, but it's now an international phenomenon.

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.

The problem with the snow is that it sticks to everything it touches. You can’t get rid of it. Even when it melts away, the chill still clings to your bones.

I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

The first notes I still play when I start a sound check are classical. Those are my roots.

Any change in attitude changes the way one sees the world, and this in turn changes the way one acts.

Chess hasn't really influenced my literature. It's true, there's a character in Pigeon Post, an old chess player; but it's more of a wink, a self-portrait and not much more.

Terrorist', noun: 1. Someone my government tells me is a terrorist; 2. Someone my President decides to kill.

For love is of God. He is the fountain, author, parent, and commander of love; it is the sum of his law and gospel.

Remember in elementary school you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file from smallest to tallest? What is the logic in that? What, do tall people burn slower?

God and the afterlife and all that is certainly a subject that's interested me, and I think it interests me more the older that I get.

Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.