The answer to subversion of democracy is more democracy, more freedom, more justice.

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.

Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

morality is moral only when it is voluntary

They were both riding too fast for reason but just fast enough for sanity.

Why is it when we talk to God we are said to be praying and when God talks to us we're said to be schizophrenic?

Food is just the greatest joy on the planet.

I remember, as a young architect, people always talked about I. M. Pei's concrete. He had a particular specification no one else knew.

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

If you put anger in the writing, then it's like an actor crying on stage. The audience will not cry with the actor and in some way inure itself against the emotion.

I don't necessarily recommend directing your husband or wife in a film, but if you have to do it, you have to do it.

I like telling the story in a visual way. I don't like explaining a lot in dialogue.