The Responsibility Of The Writer

There Are By Now Declassified Documents From The 1950s That Tells You A Lot About What's Going On In Egypt And We Should Have Known It Then. It's About Exactly What's Happening, How We Can Disregard Public Opinion As Long As The Dictators We Support Are Capable Of Suppressing Their Populations. So To Hell With Public Opinion. That's All Right There In The 1950's. That's Not Security. That's Not Security Of The Government. That's, If Anything, Security From Its Own Population. And There's A Lot Of That.

Some Innate Capacity - Some Part Of The Human Genetic Endowment - Enters Into Language Acquisition. That Much Is Uncontroversial Among Those Who Believe That Humans Are Part Of The Natural World. If It Were Not True, Would Be A Miracle That My Granddaughter Reflexively Identified Some Elements Of The Blooming Buzzing Confusion As Language-related And Went On To Acquire Capacities Of The Kind That You And I Are Now Exercising, While Her Pet Kitten (chimp, Songbird, Bee...), Presented With Exactly The Same Data, Could Not Take The First Step, Let Alone The Later Ones.

When I Look At Public Opinion, I'm Not Far Out Of The Mainstream. I'm In It, In Many Respects. In Some Respects, Public Opinion Goes Beyond Anything I've Ever Said.

The Intellectual Tradition Is One Of Servility To Power, And If I Didn't Betray It I'd Be Ashamed Of Myself.

I Have Trouble Reading Modern Hebrew. In The 1950s, I Could Read Anything. I Don't Know How Much Experience You've Had With Contemporary Hebrew. It's Quite Difficult.