A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

I also learned from reading the left-wing press about the [Franklin] Roosevelt administration's indirect support for Francisco Franco, which was not well known, and still isn't.

Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn't survive very long if they did that.

In general I don't think the image of the state as a divinity is very helpful.

The intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to . . a faceless professional.

Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.

They are involve in producing products and there are different kinds of people running them, but the principle is the same. A corporation shouldn't have the right. Under American law as its developed over the past century, corporation do have personal rights, but I think that's a very negative development.