Remember, the U.S. is a powerful state, it's not like Libya. If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The United States hires terrorist states.

The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately UNDERSTOOD by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.

Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it.

I think that the real tragedy of Greece - aside of the savagery of European bureaucracy, Brussels bureaucracy and northern banks, which was really savage - is that the Greek crisis didn't have to erupt. It could have been taken care of pretty easily at the very beginning. But it happened and Syriza came into office with a declared commitment to combat it, and in fact as I recall they actually called a referendum, which horrified Europe.