No sane human being devotes 100% of his or her life to political activism.

While I think in principle people should not have irrational beliefs, I should say that as a matter of fact, it is people who hold what I regard as completely irrational beliefs who are among the most effective moral actors in the world, in many respects. They're among the worst, but also among the best, even though the moral beliefs are ostensibly the same.

Adam Smith is an egalitarian, he believed in equality of outcome, not opportunity. He is an enlightenment figure, pre-capitalist. He says, suppose in England, one landowner got most of the land and other people would have nothing to live on. He says it wouldn't matter much, because the rich land owner, by virtue of his sympathy for other people would distribute resources among them, so that by an invisible hand, we would end up with a pretty egalitarian society. That is his conception of human nature.

The US is also unusual in the enormous scale of religious fundamentalism. The impact on understanding of the world is extraordinary. In national polls almost half of those surveyed have reported that they believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago (or less) and that man shares no common ancestor with the ape. There are similar beliefs about the Second Coming.

After World War II there were many Jews who remained in refugee camps...President Harry F. Truman called for the Harrison Commission to investigate the situation in the camps and it was a pretty gloomy report. There were very few Jews admitted into the United States.

We don't live in tyrannies, you know, the king doesn't decide what's legitimate, and there's much more freedom than there was in the past.

Intellectuals of the categories happen to enjoy unusual privilege, unique in history, I suppose. It's easy enough to find ugly illustrations of repression, malice, dishonesty, marginalization and exclusion in the academic world.