Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.

Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.

People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky.

In America, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the Occupy movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.

Whatever else their faults may be, they were not radical Islamist states - Iraq was not, Syria is not, Libya was not. The most radical fundamentalist Islamist state is, of course, your America's Saudi Arabia.

I don't want to be a victim. I don't want to disappear into the darkness.