People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the political arena. That's really threatening.

You can see it in the worship of [Ronald] Reagan, which portrays him as somebody who saved us from government. Actually he was an apostle of big government.

As elite attitudes towards public education over time illustrate, simple formulas are far from adequate. There are conflicting tendencies.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

There was a striking example of this in Pakistan when the US sent in Special Forces, to be honest, to kill Osama Bin Laden. He could easily have been apprehended and caught but their orders were to kill him.

The US is a country [in which] eighty percent of the population thinks the Bible was written by god. About half think every word is literally true. So it's had to appeal to that - and to the nativist population, the people that are frightened, have always been... It's a very frightened country and that's increasing now with the recognition that the white population is going to be a minority pretty soon, "they've taken our country from us."

The senate was wealthy people and it wasn't elected, it was chosen through legislatures, which themselves were under private influence, powerful influence. They were remote from the population and that's where power was suppose to reside.