Noam Chomsky

It’s not radical Islam that worries the US – it’s independence

Ultimately it’s a question of whether democracy is going to be allowed to exist, and to what extent. And it’s entirely natural that the business world, along with the state, which they largely dominate, would want to limit democracy. It threatens them.

As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads.

Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

People tend to rally around power.

[on Trump] We can objectively see quite serious achievements even during his short time in office.

The idea that workers are only interested in horse-racing [odds] is an absurdity that cannot withstand even a superficial look at labour history or the lively and independent working class press that flourished in many places, including the manufacturing towns of New England…

In war I would deal with the Devil and his grandmother

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.

The internet is an élite organization; most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.

We could only solve our problems by cooperating with other countries. It would have been paradoxical not to cooperate. And therefore we needed to put an end to the Iron Curtain, to change the nature of international relations, to rid them of ideological confrontation, and particularly to end the arms race.

The universities…are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it’s generally true of corporations. It’s true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic.

I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen, down on 7-11, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down

We’re numb. We’re numb to 500 kids getting killed in Chicago last year. We’re numb that there were dozens of police shootings in the beginning of July. We’re numb to places on the earth where we don’t live. Our life is OK, but it’s OK for other people’s lives to not be OK.

Nothing is sincere….But…[liberals] should be praising [Trump] for [reducing tensions with Russia and sensible Korean denuclearization] and supporting it, but instead, the liberals are so insane that they’re attacking him for the few things he’s doing which makes sense.

We [U.S.S.R. and U.S.A.] can exist peacefully together if we don’t indulge in too much mutual fault-finding in all kinds of trifles.

Preventing the conflicts of tomorrow means changing the mindsets of the youth of today.

Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Great Britain provided time; the United States provided money and Soviet Russia provided blood.