There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

We had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human nature. If you look at human societies and human interactions, you can find anything. You find selfishness, you find altruism, you find sympathy.

There isn't much doubt that like other animal societies, those of Homo sapiens involved plenty of cooperation, which might have been considerably enhanced, one would suppose, by the emergence of the remarkable instrument of language.

Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.

I don't suggest that the observations are surprising or profound. Rather, they seem to me the merest truisms. I was not aware that [ Michel] Foucault had used the phrase "speaking truth to power." I had thought it was an old Quaker phrase.

There was also a national policy, which as a child I didn't know anything about. In 1924 the first major immigration law was passed. Before that, there was an Oriental Exclusion Act, but other than that, European immigrants like my parents were generally admitted in the early years of the twentieth century. But that ended in 1924 with an immigration law that was largely directed against Jews and Italians.

My own feeling is that a corporation has no right to have a political or social influence.