The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there's something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males.

The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it's called democratic.

Those lucky enough to qualify as "intellectuals" have their own special responsibilities, deriving from their good fortune. Among these is the task that [Edward] Said describes, surely an important one.

Suppose that I see a hungry child in the street, and I am able to offer the child some food. Am I morally culpable if I refuse to do so? Am I morally culpable if I choose not to do what I easily can about the fact that 1000 children die every hour from easily preventable disease, according to UNICEF? Or the fact that the government of my own "free and open society" is engaged in monstrous crimes that can easily be mitigated or terminated? Is it even possible to debate these questions?

Control is the source of strategic power.

I don't think there is any scientific evidence about the question of whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don't think in language necessarily. We also think in visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can't even express in words what the content of our thinking is. And even if we are able to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.

Modern science and technology can relieve men of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it.