Control is the source of strategic power.

It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.

An effective regulatory system today would be one guided by a few basic premises that can be applied flexibly but also universally.

Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.

Intellectuals (in the standard sense of the term, not [ Edward] Said's prescriptive sense) are the people who write history.

As long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.

What matters is the way we Americans think about ourselves. We think about ourselves as incapable of committing crimes. Everything we do, we make a lot of errors, you know, you can't help it. Mistakes all over the place, but out of naïveté or, you know, misplaced kindness or something like that.