Africa's a wreck and it's not because it was hit by an asteroid. It's a wreck largely because it was hit by Europe.

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can't afford the time to think.

The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

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.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

If you want to control a population... give them a God to worship.

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.

Liberty is always dangerous but it is the safest thing we have.

Look . . . at . . . me. . . .

The world must be rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.

As cities grow and technology takes over the world, belief and imagination fade away, and so do we.

I may indeed very well happen to contradict myself; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.

Yeah, I mean the material, directors, the other cast, and if you think you can do something with the character then you do it and go from there. I am looking forward to doing some smaller movies.

Someone unfamiliar with the mountains and forests cannot advance [the team]. One who does not employ local guides cannot gain the advantage.

Teach self-denial and make its practice pleasure, and you can create for the world a destiny more sublime that ever issued from the brain of the wildest dreamer.