The best defense against democracy is to distract people.

The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.

Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: 'What is the scientific status of the claims?' 'What social or ideological needs do they serve?'

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

There is no reason to believe ... that the "essential purpose" of language is "communication". Language can be used to transmit information, but it also serves many other purposes: to establish relations among people, to express or clarify thought, for play, for creative mental activity, to gain understanding, and so on. In my opinion, there is no reason to accord privileged status to one or the other of these modes.

To construct a scientific theory from the data and to be able to recognize that it is a reasonable theory is possible only if there are some very sharp restrictive principles that lead you to go in one direction and not in another direction. Otherwise, you wouldn't have science at all, merely randomly chosen hypotheses.

[Isaiah] Berlin's observation is accurate enough, and applies at home as well, and even more harshly for the reasons already mentioned: the apparatchiks and commissars could at least plead fear in extenuation.