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.

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.

The universe offers you three things that money cannot buy: joy, love, and life.

It's why you need other fingers, other tongues. Only other people can make you feel real.

Trouble will rain on those who are already wet.

I know who the Versace woman is because I wear the clothes myself.

Teenagers are my life and my triumph. I'd be nowhere without them.

God is to me that creative force, behind and in the universe, who manifests Himself as energy, as life, as order, as beauty, as thought, as conscience, as love.

There are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't.

If you're wasting time, you're wasting money... and that's just sick.

Never having failed, I could not picture what failure meant.

The Khodorkovsky case is typical of the "oprichnina" - the system of oppression.