Norman Finkelstein

“I am opposed to any state with an ethnic character, not only to Israel.”

“I was probably unusually close to my parents, so I do what I can now to preserve the integrity of their memory. The Holocaust deserves to be remembered.”

“No doubt one can, in light of further study and life experience, come to repudiate past convictions.”

“Personal convictions are not politics. Personal convictions, if they become the subject of a group conviction, they become a cult.”

“International law says people fighting for self-determination can use force in order to achieve their independence.”

“There are contradictory tendencies in American society. There's a huge range of activities that one can engage in that mark it as a quite free society. It's also true to say that the powers that be have so much control over how people think that there are fewer and fewer people who make use of the rights and information available to them.”

“The moment you have massive social and political commentary trying to explain a phenomenon, then you know we are no longer dealing with a strictly psychiatric question.”

“Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense if not sheer fraud.”

“You know, frankly speaking, money just doesn't figure largely in my world view.”

“Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.”

“DePaul's plot to deny me tenure had nothing to do with my faults. In fact, and ironically, it viciously attacked me and destroyed my career because of my virtues. Which, although few in number, they still found threatening.”

“Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread?”

“Every victory of Hezbollah, I celebrate.”

“Israel has been a stage on which American Jews have played out their fantasies of toughness - often from Martha's Vineyard.”

“The whole purpose of annual reviews is to keep you abreast of whether or not you are fulfilling the requirements of tenure.”

“Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.”

“I think that people like Bloomberg, they're complete thugs. No question about it. But on the other hand, it must be said that they are politically savvy. They don't get into those positions of power - in the case of Bloomberg, both economic and political power - by being anybody's fool.”

“I voted for Nader, and I have no doubts at all that it was the right thing to do because the Nader candidacy was extremely energising and a terrific phenomenon in American life, and I hope he continues.”

“People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country.”

“I don't want to become a rhetorical speaker. My effectiveness is mastering all of the data and being able to respond.”