I felt that we could hardly improve on the conception of the university expressed by one of the founders of the modern system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, also one of the founders of classical liberalism. That seems to me true today as well, though ideals of course have to be adapted to changing circumstances.

I think individuals have a right to privacy, but that ought to include the right to prevent private institutions from monitoring what you do and building up a personal profile for you so that they can direct you in particular ways by their effective control over the internet, and that doesn't happen of course.

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.

The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it.

It's very common for the victims to understand a system better than the people who are holding the stick.

Syria is bad enough, it's a pretty terrible atrocity. But there are much worse ones in the world. So for example, the worst atrocities in the past decade have been in the Congo, the Eastern Congo, where maybe 5 million people have been killed.

I don't like piracy but if anybody's concerned about piracy, why don't they pay attention to our role in it?