There have been repeated cases when nuclear war came ominously close, often a result of malfunctioning of early-warning systems and other accidents, sometimes [as a result of] highly adventurist acts of political leaders.

The idea that Hezbollah is acting as an agent of Iran is very dubious. It's not accepted by specialists on Iran or specialists on Hezbollah. But it's the party line. Or sometimes you can put in Syria, i.e. "Syrian-supported Hezbollah," but since Syria is of less interest now you have to emphasize Iranian support.

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.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.

If you want to talk about distributing substances that are lethal, . . . let's be serious. Tobacco is far ahead of anything else. Alcohol is second.

Every wave of immigrants who came [to America] were treated pretty badly, but when they all finally became integrated, all of us became Anglo-Saxons.