Noam Chomsky

Well take, say a corporate executive By law, a corporate executive must work to increase the profitability of the corporation. Disregarding the effects that it has on others. That’s actually a legal principle and that’s psychopathic.

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

Education is really aimed at helping students get to the point where they can learn on their own because that is what you’re going to do during your life, not just absorb materials given to you by the outside, and repeat it.

So investors don’t go down to the television studio and make sure that the local talk show host or news director is doing what they want. On the other hand, there are other complex mechanisms which make it fairly certain that they will do what the owners and investors want.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

Think of the feudal system. You had kings and princes and bishops and lords and so on. They for the most part did not want power to be totally concentrated, they didn’t want total tyrants.

Comparing the EU to the Soviet Union is as unwise as it is insulting. The Soviet Union was about prisons and gulags, borders and walls, violence against citizens and neighbours. The European Union is about freedom and human rights, prosperity and peace, life without fear, it is about democracy and pluralism – a continent without internal borders and walls.

I have been very happy in the House of Representatives.

The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent, the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.

No references to the need to fight terror can be an argument for restricting human rights.

The Thirteenth Amendment formally ended slavery, but a decade later “slavery by another name” (also the title of an important study by Douglas A. Blackmon) was introduced. Black life was criminalized by overly harsh codes that targeted black people.

I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.

World dictatorship can be established only when the victory of socialism has been achieved in certain countries or groups of countries … [and] when these federation of republics have finally grown into a world union of Soviet Socialist Republics uniting the whole of mankind under the hegemony of the international proletariat organized as a state.

The Russian parliament has condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.

No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as ’embedded.’ To say, ‘I’m an embedded journalist’ is to say, ‘I’m a government Propagandist.

Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile. This is a party of government, and I will lead it as a party of government.

Ex-Presidents of the United States get state subsidies. Not so in Russia. You get no government support.

Libya is divided into tribes and clans.

We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.

Like, say I can choose to buy a Toyota or a Chevrolet, but I can’t choose in a market system to get a subway system, that is a collective action. Market systems don’t allow that. So it has an enormous distorting effect on the choices that are available.