We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.

There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them

The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.

The U.S. directed the war against South Vietnam. There was a political settlement in 1954. But in the late '50's the United States organized an internal repression in South Vietnam, not using its troops, but using the local apparatus it was constructing. This was a very significant and very effective campaign of violence and terrorism against the Vietminh - which was the communist-led nationalist force that fought the French. And the Vietminh at that time was adhering to the Geneva Accords, hoping that the political settlement would work out in South Vietnam.

[Isaiah] Berlin's observation is accurate enough, and applies at home as well, and even more harshly for the reasons already mentioned: the apparatchiks and commissars could at least plead fear in extenuation.

The country was founded on the principle that primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.

I organized tax resistance in 1965, with a friend. I kept at it for about ten years. I don't see it as a principle, it's a tactic. And I felt I had exhausted its potential as a tactic right about then, so I stopped.