Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.

We can try to gain some of the sensibility of some of the indigenous populations of the world or our predecessors 800 years ago. We can laugh at them as being naive and unsophisticated, but unless we can gain that sensibility that there has to be rights of nature as Bolivians and others put it, then we're going to be destroyed.

There’s no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Genghis Khan.

In the sciences particularly the large public universities must and do take an active role in fostering creativity and independence; otherwise the fields will wither, and along with them even the aspirations of wealth and power.

Suppose Vietnam could separate itself from the American dominated global system and carry out a successful social and economic development. Then that is very dangerous because then it could be a model to other movements and groups in neighboring countries. And gradually there could be an erosion from within by indigenous forces of American domination of the region.

Every great power, every aggressive power has always regarded itself as exceptional and as doing things only for the most moral ends.

If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market.