Of course the Republicans have long wanted to privatize Social Security and destroy it. But Social Security has been the most important and valuable social program in the history of the United States.

Life doesn't just happen it's constructed through the history of power. And that's something I am interested in and so is the art world: a world that's trying to engage socially with a leftist slant to work out how we got here.

All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.

A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens some of Zola 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and in modern drama Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart.'

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

The principle that human nature in its psychological aspects is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class apart from redneck which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions of real interests and materials is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations study hell.