"There are things that I resonate to when I read, but I have a feeling that my feelings and attitudes were largely formed prior to reading literature. In fact, I’ve been always resistant consciously to allowing literature to influence my beliefs and attitudes with regard to society and history.
Loc. 324-26
If I think back about my experience, there’s a dark spot there. That’s what schooling generally is, I suppose. It’s a period of regimentation and control, part of which involves direct indoctrination, providing a system of false beliefs. But more importantly, I think, is the manner and style of preventing and blocking independent and creative thinking and imposing hierarchies and competitiveness and the need to excel, not in the sense of doing as well as you can, but doing better than the next person. Schools vary, of course, but I think that those features are commonplace. I know that they’re not necessary, because, for example, the school that I went to as a child wasn’t like that at all.
Loc. 361-66
I think schools could be run quite differently. That would be very important, but I really don’t think that any society based on authoritarian hierarchic institutions would tolerate such a school system for very long. As Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis have pointed out, it might be tolerated for the elite, because they would have to learn how to think and create and so on, but not for the mass of the population.
Loc. 366-69
I was planning to drop out to pursue my own interests, which were then largely political. This was 1947, and I had just turned eighteen. I was deeply interested, as I had been for some years, in radical politics with an anarchist or left-wing (anti-Leninist) Marxist flavor, and even more deeply involved in Zionist affairs and activities—or what was then called “Zionist,” though the same ideas and concerns are now called “anti-Zionist.” I was interested in socialist, binationalist options for Palestine, and in the kibbutzim and the whole cooperative labor system that had developed in the Jewish settlement there (the Yishuv), but had never been able to become close to the Zionist youth groups that shared these interests because they were either Stalinist or Trotskyite and I had always been strongly anti-Bolshevik. We should bear in mind that in the latter stages of the Depression, when I was growing up, and even in subsequent years to an extent, these were very lively issues.
Loc. 379-86
I was very strongly opposed to the idea of a Jewish state back in 1947–48. I felt sure that the socialist institutions of the Yishuv—the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine—would not survive the state system, as they would become integrated into a sort of state management and that would destroy the aspects of the Yishuv that I found most attractive.
Loc. 423-26
I didn’t have any affiliation to any group, the Zionist left or elsewhere. Partly it was that I’m not much of a “joiner,” I guess. Furthermore, every organization that I knew of, on the left at least, was Leninist, either Stalinist or Trotskyite. I was always very anti-Leninist, and I simply didn’t know of any group at all that shared my views. This was true of the Zionist left, and of much of the American left at the time, as far as I knew. This was the early forties that we’re talking about. Quite frankly I didn’t see any significant difference between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists, except that the Trotskyites had lost.
Loc. 442-47
The Jewish working-class culture in New York was very unusual. It was highly intellectual, very poor; a lot of people had no jobs at all and others lived in slums and so on. But it was a rich and lively intellectual culture: Freud, Marx, the Budapest String Quartet, literature, and so forth, That was, I think, the most influential intellectual culture during my early teens."
Loc. 462-65
Nunca me revi nas teorias políticas de Noam Chomsky. Depois de ler a entrevista aqui citada fiquei a perceber melhor porquê. LFB
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