“In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.”

Perhaps the most striking assault on the foundations of traditional liberties is a little-known case brought to the Supreme Court by the Obama administration, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.

The leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things.

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

On the Internet, you think everything is going to be public.

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.