Social Security is based on a principle. It's based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat.

As far as U.S. intelligence knows, Iran is developing nuclear capacities, but they don't know if they are trying to develop nuclear weapons or not. Chances are they're developing what's called 'nuclear capability,' which many states have. That is the ability to have nuclear weapons if they decide to do it. That's not a crime.

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia - that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

Well before September 11, it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom - along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

In 1949, China declared independence - an event known in Western discourse as 'the loss of China' in the U.S. - with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that's so deep in history that there's no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress 'suspects.'

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today's political scene.

Science, as everyone knows, is responsible, moderate, unsentimental, and otherwise good.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

In Latin America, specialists and polling organisations have, for some time, observed that the extension of formal democracy was accompanied by an increasing disillusionment about democracy and a lack of faith in democratic institutions.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it.

Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It's a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can't get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt, it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy.

The close Turkish-Israeli relations go back to the late 1950s - military intelligence, commercial, more recently, tourism and cultural relations.

If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.

I don't think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.

China is a great manufacturing center, but it's actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial - more advanced industrial centers - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe - and it basically assembles them.

The whole infrastructure of air travel was, and is, part of government policy. It is not a natural development of a free economic system - at least not in the way that is claimed. The same is true of the roads, of course.

I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven - that's none of my business, ultimately. I won't lecture her on the philosophy of science.

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.

If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.

I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.