When people know we are ready to use nuclear weapons, they're going to back off if we do something aggressive. So basically, nuclear weapons are always being used.

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.

It is not Sufism if it does not perform its function for you. A cloak is no longer a cloak if it does not keep a man warm.

It was hope, dying unsurprised.

The free man is not he who defies the rules ... but he who, recognizing the compulsions inherent in his being, seeks rather to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest each day's experience.

Most people that work in [show] business, if they're not gypsies by nature, become gypsies, just because of the reality of this business.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

I kind of got inspired by [William] Wordsworth and [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge - I went the old traditional way of finding inspiration, I guess.

It's always been very clear to me that I was going to be a mother and that my purpose in life was to give life.

I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.

Sometimes, in a part, everything comes together.

When I ask questions I'm genuinely curious and trying to learn.