It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.

We're supposed to forget whatever happened in the past because 9/11 is where history begins. Okay, since 2001, how many wars have been started, how many countries have been destroyed? So now ISIS is the new evil - but how did that evil begin? Is it more evil to do what ISIS is doing, which is to go around massacring people - mainly, but not only, Shi'a - slitting throats? By the way, the US-backed militias are doing similar things, except they don't show beheadings of white folks on TV.

Snowden is the thoughtful, courageous saint of liberal reform. And Julian Assange is a sort of radical, feral prophet who has been prowling this wilderness since he was 16 years old.

Going to Oxford didn't necessarily make a person clever.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably... in the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.

When people say "the people" or "the public" as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.