There are few takers for the quiet heart.
Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system.
We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
The responsibilities of someone in a more free and open society are, again obviously, greater than those who may pay some cost for honesty and integrity.
I mean, it’s true, nobody talks about them, but when you bring it up, the idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that they own and you work there, and you built it but you don’t own it, that’s a highly unnatural notion. You don’t have to study any complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity.
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. Tuition fee increases are a disciplinary technique, and by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.
Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull.
Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.
Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest.
Everything is full and pure at its source and precisely there, not outside.
Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.