[The Republican Party] for example, they do run the House of Representatives, they're a majority there, and it's the House that is essentially sending the government into shutdown and maybe default. But they won the majority of seats there because of various kinds of chicanery. They got a minority of the votes, but a majority of the seats, and they're using them to press forward an agenda which is extremely harmful to the public.

We could not bring democracy to South Vietnam at a cost that we were willing to accept. So it was a disaster. That' is the left extreme.

Sooner or later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous.

I don't claim to know a lot about Mexico, but I did talk to quite a number of left Mexican intelectuals, and they all said the same thing. That there's a lot of popular, kind of, concern and activism, but it is very fragmented. That the groups have very specific, narrow agendas and they don't interact and cooperate with one another. Ok, that's something you have to overcome to build a mass popular movement. And that's, media can help, but they also benefit from it.

I don't buy much. Almost buy nothing. I buy what I need, do it the easiest way possible.

Intellectuals of the categories happen to enjoy unusual privilege, unique in history, I suppose. It's easy enough to find ugly illustrations of repression, malice, dishonesty, marginalization and exclusion in the academic world.

Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.