“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.”

In the case of the environment, there’s no one to bail it out.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

Fidel Castro, whatever people may think of him, is a hero in Latin America, primarily because he stood up to the United States.

The childcare tax credit makes some sense.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers.

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.

A woman in Santa Barbara, California, sent a $40,000 check. I fondled it for about five minutes and then sent it back. I told her I couldn’t accept money from strangers.

Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.

The image and the costs of a Berlin-like wall or a Great Wall of China is something that the American people have not accepted to date.

It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

Failure is enriching. It’s also important to accept that you’ll make mistakes – it’s how you build your expertise.

How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

When I started out, I didn’t feel like I was really accepted in the music or comedy communities, and I was somewhere on the edge, but now I feel like I’m accepted in both, which is extremely gratifying.

I went to Performing Arts because that was the only school that would accept me. My scholastic level was not very high.