Just recently, the administration of Barack Obama, which has broken all sorts of records in regards to deportation, picked up a Guatemalan man living here [in U.S]. I think he had been living here for twenty-five years, had a family, a business, and so on. He had fled from the Mayan region and they picked him up and deported him. To me, that's really sick.

I agree with Bill Clinton that US forces should not be sent to Haiti, but not for his reasons.

Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

You can't get votes that way. So [the Republicans] have been compelled to mobilize a base of voters and gone to elements of the country that have always been there but were kind of marginal to the political system, for example, religious extremists.

The intellectual world is deeply conformist... We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense.

People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone.