Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things. Noam Chomsky

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination,' we might say - exercised through the mass media.

The communists were mainly responsible for the destruction of the Spanish anarchists. Not just in Catalonia - the communist armies mainly destroyed the collectives elsewhere.

If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages. There were dozens of languages in France and Italy, and they're all called French [and Italian], but they were not mutually comprehensible. They were different languages. And they have mostly disappeared in the last century or so. Some are being preserved, like Welsh, some are being revived, like Basque or Catelan to some extent. There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because they talk a different language.

The Second World War ended with a radicalization of the population in the United States and everywhere else, and called for all kinds of things like popular takeovers, government intervention, and worker takeovers of factories. Business propagated a tremendous propaganda offensive. The scale surprised me when I read the scholarship - it's enormous, and it's been very effective. There were two major targets: one is unions, the other is democracy.