Orwell says straight, look, in England what comes out in a free country is not very different from this totalitarian monster that I'm describing in the book. It's more or less the same. How come in a free country? He has two sentences, which are pretty accurate. One, he says, the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. And second - and I think this is much more important - a good education instills in you the intuitive understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say.

In the pre-capitalist world, everyone had a place. It might not have been a very nice place, even maybe a horrible place, but at least they had some place in the spectrum of the society and they had some kind of a right to live in the place. Now that's inconsistent with capitalism, which denies the right to live. You have only the right to remain on the labour market.

CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That's one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They're similar societies and it's bad enough there, but here we're in the stratosphere. ] There's no particular reason for it.

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

A default of the US government would not only be very harmful here, it would probably send the country back into deep recession, but it just might crash the international financial system.

What can realistically be done depends on the historical moment. The same is true with regard to the agents.

It was declared by Congress that marijuana makes people insane. But . . . lawyers, defense lawyers, got the idea, OK, I can use this for an insanity defense.