As to whether those who fit the common meaning of the term "intellectual" should act in the manner that [ Edward] Said prescribes, that's another question. Needless to say, I agree with him that they should, and that they commonly do not.

One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics, as he calls it - very outstanding political economist - which essentially - I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.

The leading, the most respected Vietnam historian, military historian Bernard Fall -he was a hawk incidentally, but he cared for the Vietnamese - he said it wasn't clear to him whether Vietnam could survive as a historical and cultural entity under the most massive attack that any region that size had ever suffered. He was talking about South Vietnam, incidentally.

The labor movement can be rebuilt, as has happened before after sharp declines.

Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.

I don't like the intellectual label.

There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of "Anglo-Saxon Law." And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.