Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.

Stability is when the U.K. and U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.

Personally, I am uneasy about the notion of "a politically engaged university," for reasons I wrote about over 30 years ago, at the height of protest and resistance (reprinted in For Reasons of State).

There is a kind of nonlinguistic thought going on which we are trying to represent in language, and we know that sometimes we fail.

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

Take something you really don't think about: Plastics in the ocean. I mean plastics in the ocean have an enormous ecological effect.

The Second World War had really devastating effects for much of Europe. It really didn't take them very long to reconstruct state capitalist democracies because it was in people's heads. There were other parts of the world that were pretty much devastated and they couldn't do it; they didn't have the conceptions in their mind. A lot of it is human consciousness.