The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That's never been impossible and never been easy.

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.

If there's a more helpless feeling than trying to reach someone you love who's trapped underground, I don't know it.

When asked, How do you write? I invariably answer, One word at a time.

The world is such a wonderful place to wander throughWhen you've got someone you love to wander along with you

Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook.

The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one.

In brief, I spend half my time trying to learn the secrets of other writers - to apply them to the expression of my own thoughts.

But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy, Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great: Of Nature's gifts thou mayst with lilies boast, And with the half-blown rose; but Fortune, O!