“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

France had a policy, initiated by General de Gaulle, of trying to turn Europe into what was then called a ‘third force,’ independent of the two superpowers, so Europe should pursue an independent course.

The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.

The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa’s major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination’, we might say – exercised through the mass media.

They come from acceptance of American values, not a rejection of them, and recognition that they’re rejected by the U.S. government and by U.S. elites, which does lead to hatred and anger.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.

In every aspect of life, have a game plan, and then do your best to achieve it.

Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.

To draw a tree, to pay such close attention to every aspect of a tree, is an act of reverence not only toward the tree, and toward the earth itself, but also our human connection to it.

Given our inevitably incomplete knowledge about key structural aspects of our ever-changing economy and the sometimes asymmetric costs or benefits of particular outcomes, a central bank.

All ideas need to be heard, because each idea contains one aspect of the truth. By examining that aspect, we add to our own idea of the truth. Even ideas that have no truth in them whatsoever are useful because by disproving them, we add support to our own ideas.

I’m much more interested in what an actor has to say about something substantial and important than who they’re dating or what clothes they’re wearing or some other asinine, insignificant aspect of their life.

I feel like casting is the most important aspect of making movies.

I feel things more deeply anything to do with kids. It just makes a big difference in my life Having a child is like taking the deepest core vulnerable aspect of myself, reaching in and taking it outside of my body.