In a capitalist system, there's a principle that if you invest, especially in a long-term risky investment, if something comes out of it, you're supposed to get the profit. It doesn't happen in our system. The taxpayer paid for it and gets nothing - assumes all of the risk, gets zero. The money goes into the pockets of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who are ripping off decades of work in the public sector.

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

I think the use of language is a very important means by which this species, because of its biological nature, creates a kind of social space, to place itself in interactions with other people. It doesn't have much to do with communication in a narrow sense; that is, it doesn't involve transmission of information. There is much information transmitted but it is not the content of what is said that is transmitted.

Isaiah Berlin described the intellectuals of [Mikhail] Bakunin's "Red bureaucracy" as a "secular priesthood.

Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal

Power has to be protected from scrutiny. That's the principle of every dictatorship, of every autocracy. You hear it from high priests at Harvard and every government department, that power has to be kept secret otherwise it will fade and it won't work. But Bradley Manning is violating that principle.

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it's been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it's over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas.