If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

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It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.

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Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.

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The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

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The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

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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.

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Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless. In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.

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It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.

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The best defense against democracy is to distract people.

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

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