The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.

The reaction we should be having to [rich liberals] is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany.

It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.

It's like these people are programmed by Karl Rove. What he wants is to have liberal critics ridicule Bush because he says 'nucular' and 'misunderestimate' and talks with a probably fake Texas accent and so on, because then can come back with the big propaganda apparatus saying, 'See, those elite liberals who run the world and are sitting around drinking French wine and eating quiche don't understand us ordinary guys'; regular guys like the guy working on the assembly line and George Bush, who is going back to his ranch to cut brush.

No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herseif as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.

Academics are not necessarily nice people.