What happened in Syria was, President [Barack] Obama had made a statement announcing what he called his "red line": You can't use chemical weapons, you can do anything else but [use] chemical weapons.

Bradley Manning should be regarded as a hero. He is doing what an honest, decent citizen should be doing: letting your population know what the government, the people who rule you are doing. They want to keep it secret of course.

During the 1960s, large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands.... The naive might call that democracy, but that's because they don't understand. The sophisticated understand that that's the crisis of democracy.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

The U.S. directed the war against South Vietnam. There was a political settlement in 1954. But in the late '50's the United States organized an internal repression in South Vietnam, not using its troops, but using the local apparatus it was constructing. This was a very significant and very effective campaign of violence and terrorism against the Vietminh - which was the communist-led nationalist force that fought the French. And the Vietminh at that time was adhering to the Geneva Accords, hoping that the political settlement would work out in South Vietnam.

Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.

I felt that we could hardly improve on the conception of the university expressed by one of the founders of the modern system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, also one of the founders of classical liberalism. That seems to me true today as well, though ideals of course have to be adapted to changing circumstances.