“The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.”

If you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.

Sometimes I lose my temper.

It matters little, at this point, where the exact truth lies in the maze of perjury, evasion, and of contempt for the normal – hardly inspiring – standards of political conduct.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual.

The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials – literally, which is why I’m teaching at MIT.

Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.

In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies.

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West.

Nicaragua dealt with the problem of terrorism in exactly the right way.

While the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

The Oslo Accords in 1993 determined that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are a single territorial entity which cannot be divided.

NATO’s essentially run by the United States.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

As a general, and as a leader of this team, whatever I’ve got to do get my guys going I’ll do it every time. If I have to be the bad guy sometime, I’ll guess I’ll take that. That’s what a leader and a general and a chief of police does.

He’s the president. I’m the general. Unless I want to get impeached, I got to do what he says.

That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.

Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.

You’ve been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General-just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns-‘fess up!

The central principle of investment is to go contrary to the general opinion, on the grounds that if everyone agreed about its merits, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive.

I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

In general, any form of exercise, if pursued continuously, will help train us in perseverance. Long-distance running is particularly good training in perseverance.