The reason academic disputes are so vicious is that so little is at stake.

Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.

Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.

In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party.

When I am at home, I never watch TV, but when I am abroad in a hotel I take a look at the BBC to find out what's going on.

[The Republican Party] for example, they do run the House of Representatives, they're a majority there, and it's the House that is essentially sending the government into shutdown and maybe default. But they won the majority of seats there because of various kinds of chicanery. They got a minority of the votes, but a majority of the seats, and they're using them to press forward an agenda which is extremely harmful to the public.

Whenever there is injustice, oppression, aggression, violence, it's standard for it to be supported by those we now call "intellectuals," but typically not by all; there is typically a fringe of dissidents. With very rare exceptions - in fact, it's hard to think of any - they suffer in one or another way; how depends on the nature of the society.