Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.

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

There has to be spiritual transformation among the masses, who have to be willing to recognize that their oppression is not a law of nature. That's what Latin American bishops were doing when they formed base communities. They were trying to get peasants to recognize that you can take your fate into your own hands. That's what the civil-rights movement did here. That's what the women's movement did.

Edward Said is a very honorable representative of the "intellectual" in the sense of the term that he defines.

Bear in mind that we [ with Edward Herman] did not devise the terms "manufacture of consent" and "engineering of consent." We borrowed them from leading figures in the media, public relations industry, and academic scholarship.

The country was founded on the principle that primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.

That's a large part of the source of the gun culture. You have to have a gun when you go into Starbucks, because who knows what's going to happen. It just doesn't happen in other countries.