Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.

The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

There's an interesting question, whether the anarchists had alternatives [in Spain]. If they did tend to support the government that had been destroyed, what were the alternatives? There was actually a proposal by Camillo Berneri, an Italian anarchist who was in Spain at the time, which is not a crazy notion in my opinion. He opposed participation in government and was against the formation of an army, meaning a major army to fight [Francisco] Franco.

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations.

Take the US. Women were not even able to vote until 90 ago, at about the same time they gained the right in Afghanistan. Rights of former slaves were very limited until the 1960s, and in some ways still are. In these and other domains there has been progress in democracy, though still seriously flawed. In other dimensions - the control of concentrated wealth over the political process, for example, things have gotten much worse in recent years. And there is much more, in both directions.