Everything depends very much on who you are, what your values are, what your commitments are, what circumstances you live in and what options you're willing to undertake, and that determines what you ought to be doing.

[Ronald] Reagan bitterly hated unions and wanted them destroyed. This began with the air controllers' strike and went on from there.

Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.

Independence of mind, enthusiasm, dedication to the field, and willingness to challenge and question and to explore new direction. There are plenty of people like that, but schools tend to discourage those characteristics.

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.

People who spend their working hours in a lab or research library or a classroom might be intent primarily on keeping or advancing their elite positions, thereby lending tacit support to power structures. Or they might not be.

In Egypt the neoliberal programs have meant statistical growth, like right before the Arab Spring, Egypt was a kind of poster child for the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund:] the marvelous economic management and great reform. The only problem was for most of the population it was a kind of like a blow in the solar plexus: wages going down, benefits being eliminated, subsidized food gone and meanwhile, high concentration of wealth and a huge amount of corruption.