What happened in the following years? Well, I think that among the educated classes it stayed the same. You talk about humanitarian intervention, it's like Vietnam was a humanitarian intervention. Among the public, it's quite different.

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.

Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

Ever since I've had any political awareness, I've felt either alone or part of a tiny minority.

Policy is largely set by economic elites and organized groups representing business interests with little concern for public attitudes or public safety, as long as the public remains passive and obedient.

Everyone engaged in research must have had the experience of working with feverish and prolonged intensity to write a paper which no one else will read or to solve a problem which no one else thinks important and which will bring no conceivable reward - which may only confirm a general opinion that the researcher is wasting his time on irrelevancies.