The reason I am a political radical is that I work on syntax. If I worked on semantics (which in fact I do), I'd be a good Thatcherite.

[For business after WWII ] democracy means getting people to regard government as an alien force that's robbing them and oppressing them, not as their government. In a democracy it would be your government.

The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.

The UN can go as far as the U.S. will allow, and no further. And it's bound by conditions that the powerful states, which means mostly the U.S., impose.

Take Germany and Japan, both defeated in the Second World War. Germany has acknowledged its monstrous crimes to a certain extent, has paid reparations and so on. Japan, in contrast, apologizes for nothing and has paid no reparations, with one exception: It pays reparations to the United States, but not to Asia.

Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are, in principle, under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist, that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level. [...] Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I am opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy.

The people we call the prophets I think are the earliest dissident intellectuals, and they're treated like most dissident intellectuals - very badly. They're imprisoned, driven into the desert. King Ahab, the epitome of evil in the Bible, condemned Elijah as a "hater of Israel." This is the first self-hating Jew, the origin of the term. It goes right up to the present. That's the history of intellectuals.