Anyone in a position to overcome barriers to free thought and communication should do so.

That intellectuals, including academics, would become a "new class" of technocrats, claiming the name of science while cooperating with the powerful, was predicted by [Mikhail] Bakunin in the early days of the formation of the modern intelligentsia in the 19th century.

In general I don't think the image of the state as a divinity is very helpful.

If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of control, then your world's gone. Like some unusual child who has a million toys and one of them is stolen, he's going to perish.

Western intellectuals, and also Third World intellectuals, were attracted to the Bolshevik counter-revolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine which says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.

The reason I am a political radical is that I work on syntax. If I worked on semantics (which in fact I do), I'd be a good Thatcherite.

People have no human rights, only the rights that they can gain on the labour market. Above all, wealth and power have to be protected.