Noam Chomsky

To confront power is costly and difficult; high standards of evidence and argument are imposed, and critical analysis is naturally not welcomed by those who are in a position to react vigorously and to determine the array of rewards and punishments.

… the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.

We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.

Read, say, George Washington, a leading figure in the settler-colonial society we live in. His view was – his words – was that we have to ‘extirpate’ the Iroquois; they’re in our way. They were an advanced civilization.

The rascal multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.

Universities are dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government,…they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of.

So sure, if you can find a theory that has some real principles which are of some interest and you can draw conclusions from them which you can apply to interpreting the actual world around you then sure, that’s wonderful. If there are such theories, I am happy to see them.

While mild social reforms have been introduced in the United States, others now conventional in Western Europe (e.g., national health insurance, minimal ‘worker participation’ in industry, etc.) have been effectively resisted here…

In accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the issues of foreign policy and defense are fully in the hands of the president.

Kim Jong Un just stated that the Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

I’m not a dictator who writes things to tell people what to do.

I have a great relationship with African Americans, as you possibly have heard. I just have great respect for them. And they like me. I like them.

We’re going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay. And the reason they’re going to pay and the way they’re going to pay, Bob, is this. We have a trade deficit now with Mexico of $58 billion a year. The wall is going to cost $10 billion a year. That’s what it’s going to cost. It’s going to be a powerful wall. It’s going to cost $10 billion.

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences…Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone. Freedom is like that. It’s like air. When you have it, you don’t notice it.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

The PR industry…have a conception of what a democracy ought to be…the specialized class are trained to do their work for the service of the masters…and the rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization because organization just causes trouble.

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it’s been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it’s over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas.

I’ve never tried to impose pressure on the authority of the government through my business achievements. I cannot tell you what the others were doing.

If someone was watching this from Mars, they’d collapse in ridicule. The United States is telling Iran to stop its aggressive militarism? I mean we occupy two countries on their border…