There is a big difference between tweeting to your friend about something that is happening and having a real personal relationship with people.

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.

So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.

Be kind to your future self, and your future will be kind to you.

For the sake of democracy, vigorous, civilized debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed.

You should just do the right thing.

That was such a wonderful time, even in its strangeness and sadness-and life isn't the same now. It's wonderful, but it isn't the same.

I meet people on the street or at book signings and they tend to treat me as if they know me, as if we're connected. It's great.

Power calls to those who are hungry for power, and there are hungry idiots everywhere.

Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.

I am firmly convinced that you shouldn't necessarily emphasize hedonism, especially at the beginning of a career, but should instead focus entirely on performance.

Life is a nightmare that prevents one from sleeping.