You don't get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.

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.

He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

As far am I'm concerned, I don't listen to radio anymore. They play the same ten songs over and over again, so why would I?

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

Those policies - more taxes, more regulation, more debt, more spending, more government - will make American worse. It just will, in my view.

Christianity is a fine religion and I wish more Christians practiced it.

One day man by the slow processes of evolution shall develop into something really fine and high - some billions of years hence, say.

On a personal level, as a Christian, it will not be Barbra Streisand I'm standing in front of when I have to make an accounting of my life.

False expectations take away joy.

The antidote to climate change is community.

Belief is the mother of reality. Excellence is a state of mind.