The Chinese government has been clear in its goal and purpose for creating and expanding Confucius Institutes throughout the country, namely to distort academic discourse on China, threaten and silence defenders of human rights, and create a climate intolerant of dissent or open discussion.
Democratic regimes may be defined as those in which, every now and then, the people are given the illusion of being sovereign, while the true sovereignty in actual fact resides in other forces which are sometimes irresponsible and secret.
If you're a history buff, you know about J. Edgar Hoover. He was likely the most powerful man in the US. If you start reading about him, the books contradict each other constantly. I was often left with very little sense of the man personally. I had a sense of what he did and didn't do and what people disagreed about whether he did this or didn't do this or that, but I was like, "Why? Why was he doing all of this?" That was my big question.
If the Church is not now as bad as the Soviet Government, that is due to the influence of those who attacked the Church
The people excited by ambitious demagogues, sooner or later return into the hands of the Aristocracy.
So many dictators trying to blackmail the free world because they have no way to compete on ideas, innovation or creativity. The Cold War was two competing visions of the future. I was always anti-communist but it was an idea at least, an alternative idea. We do not have a competing vision for the future because the ideals of these dictators are in the past. They are time travellers. They need confrontation and destruction to survive. The problem is, many people in the free world are sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.
In the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on, people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much.
Indoctrinate the Children. And when they grow to be Men and Women, their Principles will be Correct!
In the main the Academy helped to frame only laws of an economic or social nature, since owing to the development of the totalitarian regime it became more and more impossible to cooperate in other spheres.
It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is...
Steve Bannon is the biggest threat to democracy that we've faced since the Civil War, but in the Civil War the champion of democracy was in the White House. So, even then, we were probably in less danger as a country than we are right now.
I really do believe that much of what coming out of Donald Trump's mouth was a play from Vladimir Putin's playbook.
