Farming out atrocities to paramilitaries is standard operating procedure.

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 sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

Truly even he errs that is wiser than the wise.

My cousin Francis and I are in perfect accord - he wants Milan, and so do I.

I have a child and I'm a parent first of all.

I'm very happy to be directing though. It's a challenge, and it's a lot of fun for me to be on set.

People are out there looking for jobs and realizing that they have to look within to do and create what the new and next thing will be. They can't rely anymore on what was usually given to them.

I want to be healed and whole and perfect again, like a misshapen slab of iron that comes out of the fire glowing, glittering, razor-sharp.

We're gonna have some fun tonight.

Courage is like a strain of yoghurt culture, if you have some you can have some more.

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.