Noam Chomsky

While greatly honored internationally, Mandela remained on the US terrorist list until 2008, when at last a congressional resolution allowed him to enter the ‘land of the free’ without special dispensation.

About 70% of the public, the lowest 70% on the income scale, are pretty much disenfranchised. Their attitudes have no detectable influence on the policies of their own representatives. As you move up the scale you get a bit more influence. When you get to the top, policy is made.

…if you want to be praised and have your books reviewed and told how brilliant you are and get great jobs, it’s not advisable to be a dissident. It’s not impossible, and in fact the system has enough looseness in it so that it can be done, but it is not easy.

The U.S….will continue to defend U.S.-based corporate and financial interests while seeking to maintain a global environment in which they can flourish. That requires, in particular, that the Third World be kept in its service role.

At the time of the First World War there was a fringe of dissidents, Bertrand Russell for example, who were in jail; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknicht, in jail; Eugene Debs, in jail. That’s the standard picture throughout history. We find it right now.

Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs.

Banning guns is an idea whose time has come.

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.

Take Spain. It was admitted into the European Community with some conditions, one of which was that it is to be what is pretty openly called a ‘barrier’ to these hordes of North Africans who the Europeans are afraid are going to flock up to Europe. It’s a narrow distance.

The threat of mutual destruction has always restrained participants of the international arena, prevented leading military powers from making hasty moves, and compelled participants to respect each other. U.S. withdrawal from treaties on anti-ballistic missiles is an attempt to put an end to strategic parity, but we will respond to this.

But free capital mobility is a high priority for the business world: it increases profit and also provides a powerful weapon to undermine labor organizing by threat of job transfer-technically illegal, but highly effective…

Public servants are paid to serve the American people. Do it well.

The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy.

Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.

The most important thing is that Milosevic agreed to sit at the negotiating table with the Kosovo Albanians.

Of course there are differences, but they are not fundamental. Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don’t think people didn’t know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason.

You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.

Iraq is a small but very proud nation.

We should be adult and grown up and decriminalise cannabis