I was in Mexico City. It's a very pleasant city in many ways. It's vibrant, lively, pretty exciting society, but also depressing in other ways, and sometimes almost hopeless, you know. So it's a combination of vibrancy and, I wouldn't say despair, but hopelessness, you know. Doesn't have to be, but it is. I mean, there is almost no economy.

I don't think there is any scientific evidence about the question of whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don't think in language necessarily. We also think in visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can't even express in words what the content of our thinking is. And even if we are able to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can't afford the time to think.

[After Vietnam] the type of interventions that are carried out are designed so as not to elicit public reactions.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

The change between horse and buggy to automobile is a big change and there hasn't been a major change since.