U.S. has no feudal background, so institutions that remained in place in Europe did not remain in place here.

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.

You have to love that government, but hate the government that might work in your interest and that you could control. That's an interesting propaganda task, but it's been carried out very well.

Markets also have a very bad psychological effect. They drive people to a conception of themselves and society in which you're only after your own good, not the good of others and that's extremely harmful.

State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.

[James] Madison pointed out in the discussion of the constitutional debates - the constitutional convention - that democracy would be a danger. He used England of course as the model and said suppose that in England everyone had the free right to vote; the poor, the propertyless - who are the great majority - would use their voting power to take away the rights of property owners to carry out what we would call land reform.

There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of "Anglo-Saxon Law." And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.