This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars — they would think the country has gone insane.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.

The United States is alone among all the countries in that it does not permit US military forces to be under any threat. Other countries are willing to have forces in peace-keeping operations where they sometimes are under threat, but the US is not willing to do that.

In the Munich agreement in late 1938 [Franklin] Roosevelt sent his chief adviser Sumner Welles, who came back with a very supportive statement saying that Hitler was someone we could really do business with and so on.

When Nazi emissaries came to the United States, they were welcomed at Harvard.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.