“Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.”

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied.

International affairs is very much run like the mafia.

I would appear on Fox News more easily than I would NPR.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.

It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.

There are two problems for our species’ survival – nuclear war and environmental catastrophe – and we’re hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

I would feel no hesitation in saying that it is the responsibility of a decent human being to give assistance to a child who is being attacked by a rabid dog.

It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we’ve seen with the Internet’s development.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‘least advanced’ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us.

Even the most cynical can hardly be surprised by the antics of Nixon and his accomplices as they are gradually revealed.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.

Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

Every economic opinion is associated with a set of assumptions.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

The universe is full of dead people who lived by assumption.

Begin challenging your own assumptions.