“I don’t think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.”

Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.

A tremendous amount of the entrepreneurial initiative, if you want to call it that, comes from the dynamic state sector on which most of the economy relies to socialize costs and risks and privatize eventual profit. And that’s achieved by, if you like, advertising.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

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.