The task for a modern industrial society is to achieve what is now technically realizable, namely, a society which is really based on free voluntary participation of people who produce and create, live their lives freely within institutions they control, and with limited hierarchical structures, possibly none at all

I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.

It's easy to put [serious threats] aside, and the media don't talk about them. Other things are more important. How am I going to put food on the table tomorrow? That's what I've got to worry about, and so on. It's very serious, but it's hard to bring out the enormity of these issues, when they do not have the dramatic character of something you can show in the movies, with a nuclear weapons falling and everything disappears.

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

Whenever there is injustice, oppression, aggression, violence, it's standard for it to be supported by those we now call "intellectuals," but typically not by all; there is typically a fringe of dissidents. With very rare exceptions - in fact, it's hard to think of any - they suffer in one or another way; how depends on the nature of the society.

U.S. analysts estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted reaction to the Bush administration's militancy and aggressiveness.

If North Korea doesn't have a deterrent, they will be wiped out.