“Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements.”

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

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

There’s a lot of fuss on the Left about election irregularities, like, you know, the voting machines were tampered with, they didn’t count the votes right, and so on.

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.