These people—the employed, the somewhat privileged—are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.

That whole idea of threats to national security is a very interesting one. The phrase is very useful for the government to try to encompass the citizenry in the same box as the government is in. To say, "We're all in this together. It threatens all of us."

War itself is the enemy of the human race.

The problem of giving health care to everybody cannot be solved so long as we're spending huge sums of money for war. Already we have a very wasteful healthcare system, the most wasteful healthcare system in the world. I mean, we spend the most money and still have 40 million people without insurance. Compare us to Cuba. Cuba is our enemy, run by a dictator, Fidel Castro. But people in Cuba get health care at least equal to that of the United States - with very scarce resources. So I think this issue is the most important domestic issue.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

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.

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.