“The rich today are richer, there are more of them, they have round-the-clock propaganda factories in Rupert Murdoch’s empire and rightwing talk radio, and corporate media have their back.”

Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.

When you put a camera in front of me, I’m home.

America is the longest argument in the world.

It’s no longer just reporting the headlines of the day, but trying to put the headlines into some context and to add some perspective into what they mean.

Democracy works when people claim it as their own

We have got to have the ugly facts in order to protect us from the official view of reality. Otherwise, we are squeezed empty and filled with what other people want us to think and feel and experience.

You know what’s the rage this year? …Hats.

There’s 1,000 ways into addiction 1,000 ways out.

David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital.

The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they’ve won.

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

Our children are being raised by appliances.

Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.

Barack Obama treated too lightly the people and forces determined to destroy him. They spat in his face and didn’t even get ticketed for a misdemeanor.

If the watchdog doesn’t bark, how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.

The Roman Empire was very, very much like us. They lost their moral core, their sense of values in terms of who they were. And after all of those things converged together, they just went right down the tubes very quickly.

It is always the adventurers who do great things, not the sovereigns of great empires.

An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.

By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.

First of all I love Empire Records and That Thing You Do and all the movies he did from that era. He hates when I bring that up.

The story of the fifth century was one of the exploitation of imperial weakness.

I have done many impious things–no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.