There is a social responsibility to take care of vulnerable people. It seems that a sensible social responsibility is obligatory education, but also decent education, and that is not happening.

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.

All human wisdom is summed up in two words wait and hope.

I need to feel a desire, to find pleasure in moving forward, creating, inventing. The day I cease to learn, I must stop.

I think of myself as a freewheeling bisexual," added Magnus. "Please never say those words in front of my parents," said Alec.

The work is the most important thing.

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

The interesting thing is how one guy, through living out his own fantasies, is living out the fantasies of so many other people.

The most ignorant are the boldest conjecturers.

If there's a good side of Islam, at the end of the day it serves evil.

Editing while you're writing is like strangling the baby in the crib.

One time my whole family played hide and seek. They found my mother in Pittsburgh!