It's easy to put [serious threats] aside, and the media don't talk about them. Other things are more important. How am I going to put food on the table tomorrow? That's what I've got to worry about, and so on. It's very serious, but it's hard to bring out the enormity of these issues, when they do not have the dramatic character of something you can show in the movies, with a nuclear weapons falling and everything disappears.

There's an interesting book called The Fugu Plan, written by Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, which describes the circumstances when European Jews came to Japan, a semi-feudal society.

Its minority rule and majority limited rights. In fact it's set up that way. If you read the framers of the constitution, including James Madison, he was pretty clear about it.

I have never heard of anyone who was a "model person" in all aspects of his or her life, intellectual life or other aspects; nor do I see why anyone should care. We are not engaged in idol worship, after all.

The general principle is that the victors don't look at themselves or concede anything. The defeated typically have to, except when it's beneficial to the powerful for them not to.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

If you look back to the anti-intervention movements, what were they? Let's take the Vietnam War - the biggest crime since the Second World War. You couldn't be opposed to the war for years. The mainstream liberal intellectuals were enthusiastically in support of the war. In Boston, a liberal city where I was, we literally couldn't have a public demonstration without it being violently broken up, with the liberal press applauding, until late 1966.