I am thinking of actual cases of adolescents, lets say, who think they have five hundred friends, because there are five hundred people on their Facebook account. But these are the kind of friends whose relation to you is that if you say 'I bought a sandwich'; they say 'did it taste good?' You know, that's a kind of interaction, but very different to having a real friend, somebody who you can actually talk to.

The UN can go as far as the U.S. will allow, and no further. And it's bound by conditions that the powerful states, which means mostly the U.S., impose.

The intellectual world is deeply conformist... We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense.

Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

Latin America has much richer resources. You'd expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century.