I was just a seventeen-year-old kid, going to Times Square to participate in this left-wing demonstration. The signs were for peace and justice and so on. But then I was attacked by police mounted on horseback and on foot. Before I knew it, I was clubbed and knocked unconscious. So it gave me a radical view of the United States, a critical view of the role of the state and of the instruments of the state - the police, the Army, and so on - as not being neutral at all in political battles, but being generally against workers and against striking people, against dissenters of all kinds.

[Nationalism is] a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands.

That's generally true of people who drop bombs from high altitudes. You don't know what's going on below. You don't see the human consequences of what you're doing.

The United States builds weapons presumably secretly, and then it sells them to other countries. So the whole business of secrecy is kind of a fake issue because hardly anything technological remains a secret for very long.

They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.

Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people.

If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.