Caterpillar was quite important because that was the first manufacturing industry that used Reaganite strike-breaking techniques. They illegally called in scabs to break a major strike. It was reported pretty well in the Chicago Tribune, who pointed out something very interesting. They said that the workers got very little support in Peoria when scabs illegally broke the strike, and that was particularly striking because that whole community had been built up by the union - it was a union-based community.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

That is [Edward Said] proposal as to how the term should be used. It surely does not describe those who are called "intellectuals" in standard usage, as he would be the first to agree.

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.

We can try to gain some of the sensibility of some of the indigenous populations of the world or our predecessors 800 years ago. We can laugh at them as being naive and unsophisticated, but unless we can gain that sensibility that there has to be rights of nature as Bolivians and others put it, then we're going to be destroyed.

There are women (some men, too, but mostly women) who are going to the occupied Palestinian territories to stand with the victims of Israeli occupation. These are very courageous Israeli women and some British and American women. That's something quite new.