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.

[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.

The "end of history" has been proclaimed many times, always falsely.

A lot of countries break (or go against) the international law.

There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it's a period of close to global stagnation.

The two countries [Pakistan and India] have already come close to nuclear confrontation twice and this could get worse. So dealing with the relationship with India is extremely important.

Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.