"By the way, it’s an example of the frivolity of a lot of the attempts to understand what’s going on. I mean, my view is that since actually most people, in fact, everybody cannot be an expert on everything. One of the things that we always do is to seize on minor and really quite unimportant things. I mean, every site does it. Look at the way in which the American right for years talked about the Churchill bust leaving the White House Oval Office in the Obama years. I didn’t want to hear another darn thing about the Churchill bust after eight years because it was in lieu of trying to understand and actually critique Obama’s foreign policy. It was just an easy shorthand. I think it’s the same, we’re always tempted to that."

"We know it happens like that from films, but too few people understand that regimes like that in Tehran operate like that on a grand scale, on the biggest of scales, and with the ultimate of brutality, and that’s how they stay empower. And one other thing on that, by the way, which is, I was reminded of this the other day, thinking about this, what I’ve just described as a sort of a problem in democracies is that we like to think everyone thinks like us, and we’d like everyone to be like us, and we believe fictions that we’re taught in films, like everyone basically wants the same things as us, and you go, you haven’t stepped outside the walls of the city if you think that."

"I think that is, again, it’s something that a lot of people sitting on the other side of the screen don’t realize, is that it may satisfy them that you call a person a liar to their face, but it doesn’t do anything, and it actually reveals nothing. If somebody is a liar and they reveal themselves to be a liar, then that’s something else. But yes, I mean, I hear you, obviously you have a lot of different voices telling you what to do. It’s also difficult because one of the things that I don’t think anyone really understands is that in the end it’s just you."