We should recall that during the Second World War and the Great Depression there was an upsurge in popular, radical democracy. In all over the world. It took different forms, but it was there, everywhere. In Greece it was in the Greek revolution, and so on. And it had to be crushed. In countries like Greece, it was crushed by violence. In countries like Italy, where the US forces entered in 1943, it was crushed by attacking and destroying the anti-German partisans and restoring the traditional order.

If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion.

The general principle is that the victors don't look at themselves or concede anything. The defeated typically have to, except when it's beneficial to the powerful for them not to.

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.

If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.