You don't get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

You can read it in history books now, but they often suppress the fact that the U.S. government tolerated [Nazi]. It's really remarkable because they claim that [Franklin] Roosevelt was impeded by the Neutrality Act. On the other hand, he bitterly condemned a Mexican businessman for sending several guns to the Republic. If you look back, oil was the one commodity that [Francisco] Franco could not receive from the Germans and the Italians, so that was quite significant.

Julian Assange shouldn't be the subject of a grand jury hearing, he should be given a medal. He's contributing to democracy.

If you read people like say Bruce Blair one of the leading, most sober, knowledgeable specialists, he says, look, [Donald Trump] statements are all over the map, but his personality is frightening, he's a complete megalomaniac.

Part of the NAFTA legislation required studies of labor practices, and there was quite a good study that came out by a labor historian on the use of NAFTA to undermine and destroy unions.