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.

The literature is like that - they [unions] are constantly talking about the masses, the danger they pose, and how to control them. They understand what they're doing, and they're very class conscious. They press policies which work for their interests.

I think such an inquiry will reveal a rather different picture: namely, it will reveal a very strong tendency for the intellectuals who are respected and privileged to be those who subordinate themselves to power.

It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.

[James] Madison pointed out in the discussion of the constitutional debates - the constitutional convention - that democracy would be a danger. He used England of course as the model and said suppose that in England everyone had the free right to vote; the poor, the propertyless - who are the great majority - would use their voting power to take away the rights of property owners to carry out what we would call land reform.

If something is repeated over and over as obvious, the chances are that it is obviously false.

I can understand the idea that there is a conspiracy. In fact, in much of the world there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense. They [CIA] created a monster and now they are appalled by it.