In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.

The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.

Obama himself has been highly supportive of Mubarak.

It is easy to dismiss the world as ‘irrelevant,’ or consumed by ‘paranoid anti-Americanism,’ but perhaps not wise.

The U.S. has strategic and economic interests in Southeast Asia that must be secured. Holding Indochina is essential to securing these interests. Therefore, we must hold Indochina.

By curious accident of history and geography, the world’s major energy resources are located pretty much in Shiite regions. They’re a minority in the Middle East, but they happen to be where the oil is, right around the northern part of the Gulf.

The Occupy movement is – it was a big surprise.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

Everybody‘s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.

There’s a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn’t mean the soldier that committed them – that means the commanders.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.

The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital – in some cases, overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today‘s political scene.

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It’s not like Egypt, where you’re going to get murdered by the security forces.

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy‘s hegemonic demands.

After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organised a People’s Summit with 35,000 participants from 140 countries – not just representatives of governments, but also civil society and activists.

In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials – literally, which is why I’m teaching at MIT.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what’s called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India.

The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster;’ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

It’s a good idea to revitalize community colleges, to cut back, to modify the student loan program so it doesn’t go through banks.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: ‘What is the scientific status of the claims?’ ‘What social or ideological needs do they serve?’

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.

The target of preventive war must have several characteristics. It must be virtually defenceless; it must be important enough to be worth the trouble; it must be possible to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.

The list of U.S. vetoes at the Security Council to protect Israeli aggression and occupation is huge.

Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don’t just succumb.

In every country except – industrial country except the United States, the government uses its massive purchasing power to negotiate drug prices. That’s one of the reasons prices are so much higher in the United States than in other countries.

Egypt is the second-largest recipient over a long period of U.S. military and economic aid. Israel is first.

The western mantra is that Israel seeks negotiations without preconditions, while the Palestinians refuse. The opposite is more accurate.

The U.S. has the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world, has about twice the per capita costs, and some of the worst outcomes. It’s also the only privatized system.

If you destroyed half the pharmaceutical production in the United States, we’d think it’s a pretty serious problem. In fact, we’d probably go to war.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.

The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.

NATO was constructed on the – with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

The Republican Party has become overwhelmingly so extreme that it’s hardly a traditional political party anymore.

Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.

Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.

The invasion of Iraq, particularly, gave a big shot in the arm to the jihadi extremists.

There was unprecedented elite condemnation of the plans to invade Iraq. Sensible analysts were able to perceive that the enterprise carried significant risks for U.S. interests, however conceived.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics – greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

Undoubtedly, the U.S. harbors leading international terrorists, people described by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department as leading terrorists, like Orlando Bosch, now Posada Carriles, not to speak of those who actually implement state terrorism.

France had a policy, initiated by General de Gaulle, of trying to turn Europe into what was then called a ‘third force,’ independent of the two superpowers, so Europe should pursue an independent course.

Armed attack has a definition in international law. It means sudden, overwhelming, instantaneous ongoing attack.

When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.

There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It’s minuscule, few percent.

Mr. Mijanovi and those associated with him are the hope and the conscience of the Yugoslav revolution.

Civil disobedience‘s main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.

The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.

There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.

Part of the population of Laos lives in urban centers, Vientiane being the largest.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

There’s plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can’t duplicate that on blogs.

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.

One of the most interesting reactions to come out of 1968 was in the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which believed there was a ‘crisis of democracy’ from too much participation of the masses.

Terrorists regard themselves as a vanguard. They’re trying to mobilize others to their cause. I mean, every specialist on terrorism knows that.

For many of the world’s conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement.

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for – presidential medal of honor.

Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free.

Sometimes I lose my temper.

Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.

The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.

In Latin America, specialists and polling organisations have, for some time, observed that the extension of formal democracy was accompanied by an increasing disillusionment about democracy and a lack of faith in democratic institutions.

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.

Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.

Reparations – not just aid – should be provided by those responsible for devastating Iraqi civilian society by cruel sanctions and military actions, and – together with other criminal states – for supporting Saddam Hussein through his worst atrocities and beyond. That is the minimum that honesty requires.

Government actually grew during the Reagan years.

It doesn’t take long to become aware of the presence of the CIA in Laos.

There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.

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

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to polls.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

I would appear on Fox News more easily than I would NPR.

Real popular culture is folk art – coalminers’ songs and so forth.

After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the ‘sense of utter irresponsibility‘ shown by the demonstrators.

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

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. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

When a politician uses the word ‘folks,’ we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

Under Clinton, the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts.

If you are giving a graduate course you don’t try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

To some degree it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.

In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It’s hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce.

Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.

Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information. You expect to see delusion and imagery.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

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

I don’t like the intellectual label.

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

Some international law specialists compare the invasion of Iraq to the ‘crimes against the peace‘ for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg.

The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.

By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti.

There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that’s been going on since the Second World War.

I don’t see anything that’s come out on WikiLeaks that was a legitimate secret.

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.

There’s a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.

If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be… a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.

The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it’s a major problem, that’s just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it.

If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.

In a democracy, in a functioning democracy, what would be happening is that popular organizations, unions, political groupings, others would be developing their programs, putting them forth, insisting that their representatives implement those programs.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson‘s investment theory of politics, as he calls it – very outstanding political economist – which essentially – I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

Why should Iran have a deterrent strategy? Well, it’s surrounded by hostile enemies. Both of its borders have been under occupation by a hostile superpower, the United States, which is constantly violating the U.N. charter by leaving open what they call the saying, ‘all options are open’ – meaning the threat of war.

It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

The doctrine that everything is fine as long as the population is quiet, that applies in the Middle East, applies in Central America, it applies in the United States.

A large majority of Americans believe that the U.N., not the U.S., should take the lead in working with Iraqis to transfer authentic sovereignty as well as in economic reconstruction and maintaining civic order.

In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers, but not against the United States.

Colombia has been the leading western recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence has grown through the ’90s.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that’s so deep in history that there’s no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.

Concentration of executive power, unless it’s very temporary and for specific circumstances, let’s say fighting world war two, it’s an assault on democracy.

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it, too. But the government won’t allow it.

Popular struggles to bring about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though there is a long way to go, and there is often regression.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act.

In September 1993, President Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn – the climax of a ‘day of awe,’ as the press described it.

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. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning.

The first scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone. It was not an easy task. There was no good text available.

The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa’s major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.

If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress ‘suspects.’

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‘among the most unspeakable crimes in history.’ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.

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

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

Obama, of course, outspent McCain.

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

We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.

There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

Obama’s primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be – protect themselves. That’s why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the U.N. vetoed several resolutions right away, calling for an end to the fighting and so on, and that was a hideous invasion.

The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.

China is a great manufacturing center, but it’s actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial – more advanced industrial centers – Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe – and it basically assembles them.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he’s regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

I have been – I have spoken in Bir Zeit a number of times.

American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn’t reduce to physics. So it’s just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

The U.S. – the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that’s hardly even a joke. 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.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.

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.

You are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions.

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

As international support for Obama’s decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world.

A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

Is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of the U.S.?

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

An individual’s refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what’s left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‘renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‘renounce beliefs’ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

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.

As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states – no more, no less.

Clinton himself acted in ways which increased the threat of terror.

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, but I would not intend this to imply that in all imaginable circumstances one must, necessarily, act in accordance with this general responsibility.

Democratic societies can’t force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called ‘least advanced’ people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‘Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?’

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people – along with despair about its future.

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

There are two problems for our species‘ survival – nuclear war and environmental catastrophe – and we’re hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn’t have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

Obama did organize a great large number of people and many enthusiastic people, what’s called in the press ‘Obama’s Army.’ But the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, to introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That’s critical.