"Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children['s] ... normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand."

"Today, we have private airline companies, but if you take a look at a Boeing plane next time you travel, you'll see that you are basically taking a ride on a modified bomber."

"Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice."

"The idea that you have to avoid teaching evolution or pretend you're not teaching it is unique in the industrial world. And the statistics are mind-boggling. Roughly half the population think the world was created a couple thousand years ago."

"Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'-blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable."

"If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it."

"All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume."

"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."

"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."

"Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated - Japan's attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example."

"The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert."

"The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history."

"Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists."

"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune."

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

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."

"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."

"There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders."