The very idea that there should be a certain class of people who give orders by virtue of their ownership of wealth and another huge class who take on orders and follow them because of their lack of access to wealth and power, that's unacceptable. So, sure it should be abolished.

Occupy was not a movement, it was a tactic. You can't sit forever in a park near Wall Street. You can't do it for more than a few months. It was a tactic I had not predicted. If people asked me, I would have said "don't do it." But it was a great success, an enormous success, with a big impact on people's thinking, on people's actions.

The [Ronald] Reagan administration picked up the rhetoric of the anti-nuclear movement; they said "Yyeah, you're right." We have to eliminate nuclear weapons.

The reason I am a political radical is that I work on syntax. If I worked on semantics (which in fact I do), I'd be a good Thatcherite.

Why did the people think [Vietnam war] was fundamentally wrong and immoral? The guys who ran the polls, John E. Rielly, a professor at the University of Chicago, a liberal professor, he said what that means is that people thought too many Americans had being killed. Another possibility is they didn't like the fact that we were carrying out the worst crime since the Second World War. But that's so inconceivable that wasn't even offered as a possible reason.

The people who were really important are the ones whose names are forgotten. And that's true of every movement that ever existed.

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.