The human species is now at a point where it has to make choices that are going to determine whether decent survival is even possible. Environmental catastrophe, including war, maybe pandemics, these are very serious issues and they can't be addressed within the current structure of institutions. That's almost given. There have to be real significant changes, and only really effective popular mass-based movements can introduce and carry forward such initiatives, as indeed did happen during the 1930s.

This crazy ban on the seven states, where we can't accept immigrants, almost every analyst points out the obvious: It just increases the threat of terror. It lays the basis for terror. It's just like the atrocities in Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo. They're the most fabulous recruiting techniques for Al Qaeda and ISIS.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

In fact, by universal grammar I mean just that system of principles and structures that are the prerequisites for acquisition of language, and to which every language necessarily conforms.

Colombia has been the leading western recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence has grown through the '90s.

The public is easily amenable to lies: the more lies there are, the greater the support for war. For instance, when the public was told that Saddam Hussein would attack the U.S., this increased support for the war.

To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.