The [Ronald] Reagan administration told the business world that they were not going to enforce the labor laws.

[After Vietnam] the type of interventions that are carried out are designed so as not to elicit public reactions.

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.

To pay attention to the actual core of the movement - that would be pretty hard. Can you concentrate for example on either the policy issues or the creation of functioning democratic communities of mutual support and say, well, that's what's lacking in our country that's why we don't have a functioning democracy - a community of real participation. That's really important. And that always gets smashed.

As a health scientist at Columbia University, Les Roberts, pointed out, sooner or later people are going to be looking at a child in a wheelchair suffering from polio and will say 'the Americans did that to him'. So they continue policies which have similar effects i.e. organising the Taliban. This will come back to them too.

I would, however, question the implication that there is some novelty in this beyond modalities [of Mikhail Bakunin], which naturally change as institutions change and develop.

Efforts can succeed over time, and not trying ensures that the worst will happen.