When something isn't constantly drummed-up by the media, [people] just don't know about it.

The people who were really important are the ones whose names are forgotten. And that's true of every movement that ever existed.

Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired.

Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.

Kaplan can't understand trivialities. The triviality here is that nobody except the ultra right-wing jingoists like Kaplan are comparing atrocities by various countries. What honest people are saying seems to be incomprehensible: that we should keep to the elementary moral level of the gospels. We should pay attention to our own crimes and stop committing them. This would be true even if we were killing one person, OK? And it's even more true when we're killing millions of people.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Power has to be protected from scrutiny. That's the principle of every dictatorship, of every autocracy. You hear it from high priests at Harvard and every government department, that power has to be kept secret otherwise it will fade and it won't work. But Bradley Manning is violating that principle.