It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.

When you have a foreign invasion - in this case by the Indonesian army - writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression.

I claim the right to take a stand once in a while.

I don't have any doubts either about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Perhaps some more should be added to the list, but I don't have the slightest doubt about human rights.

The number of jobs created under President Barack Obama's stimulus turned out to be fewer than the number we would have had if the government had done nothing - according to the Obama administration's own analysis. So we got $9 trillion of debt with almost nothing to pay for it.

For wide swaths of training and education there are valuable spillovers which mean that the private sector needs support from the government. That is why I have been so determined to protect and grow apprenticeships and put higher education on a sustainable footing.

There isn't one thing the federal government does that anybody in Big Business would emulate, at least not in the profit sector.

It's never a good thing to see a government agency talk in secret about the need to 'control protestors' - especially when that agency is charged with protecting the homeland against terrorists, not nonviolent demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceable dissent.