I wonder how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own.

That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.

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.

Even if you assume presidents were democratically elected they still have no right to keep secrets from the American people.

The meaning ... of a writer will be found not just in what he intends to say, or what he does literally say, but in the effect of his writing on living beings.

Majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok. That is very flawed notion of what democracy is. Democracy has to take into account several things - proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. Majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. People have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.

Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.