I used to be a businessman and I enjoyed what I did and I thought that it was socially useful. I don't have anything against business or private enterprise or capitalism per se, but I think that it is time to rethink the regulation of capitalism.

I thought I should try something relatively inexpensive, relatively contained, relatively small. I started working on a feature, a film I'd still like to make: a very talky film of people and ideas about our contemporary state with regard to relationships, marriage, sex, and romance. I started trying to educate myself about filmmaking.

Any attempt to disturb the deadly routine of instruction is looked upon as sabotage. And the notion that the aims and functions of education should be determined in the local community by a close and continuous discussion among students, faculty, administration, and citizens is so visionary that it is not even seriously considered.

Everyone knows, or has strongly suspected, that capital theory is difficult.

It is much simpler and easier to collect and caress the trophies of our democratic inheritance than it is to fashion up-to-date tools with which to work on our current problems.

I sort of plunged into filmmaking. I decided I'd jump off the deep end, so I started thinking about what kind of a movie I should try to make.

You shall hear a good account of me or of my death.

I'm actually all in favor of freeing the entrepreneurial spirit - but it turns out, interestingly, that you actually need very strict regulations to free the entrepreneurial spirit.

Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong.

But that's not how most of the people mentioned in this book became wealthy. Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked. And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful.