Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

Over the years, there's been case after case when there were very narrow decisions that had to be made about whether to launch nuclear weapons in serious cases. What is this guy [Donald Trump] going to do if his vaunted negotiating skills fail, if somebody doesn't do what he says? Is he going to say, "Okay we'll nuke them? We're done?"

The people we call the prophets I think are the earliest dissident intellectuals, and they're treated like most dissident intellectuals - very badly. They're imprisoned, driven into the desert. King Ahab, the epitome of evil in the Bible, condemned Elijah as a "hater of Israel." This is the first self-hating Jew, the origin of the term. It goes right up to the present. That's the history of intellectuals.

The United States is going to continue to punish Iran because of its defiance.

To pay attention to the actual core of the movement - that would be pretty hard. Can you concentrate for example on either the policy issues or the creation of functioning democratic communities of mutual support and say, well, that's what's lacking in our country that's why we don't have a functioning democracy - a community of real participation. That's really important. And that always gets smashed.

The Second World War had really devastating effects for much of Europe. It really didn't take them very long to reconstruct state capitalist democracies because it was in people's heads. There were other parts of the world that were pretty much devastated and they couldn't do it; they didn't have the conceptions in their mind. A lot of it is human consciousness.

The Obama administration is dedicated to increasing terrorism. In fact, he is doing it all over the world. Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history. The drone assassination campaigns - which are just part of the special forces operations and so on - all of these operations are terror operations.