The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.

There is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.

In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.

I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.

Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That's true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empireearlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future.

And as a Christian, I got something the world didn't give me, the world can't take away, so I find joy that can never be reduced to anything.