Noam Chomsky

Much research, including a widely quoted Rand Corporation study of 1994, has shown that prevention and treatment are considerably more cost-effective than the coercive [drug war] measures that receive the bulk of funding. Such nonpunitive measures are also of course far more humane.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.

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.

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…

The centerpiece of [Trump’s] press conference with Putin, bitterly condemned by elite opinion, was his effort to discredit Mueller. The tactic is succeeding quite well…polls show that Mueller’s public image is at an all-time low.

There was a recent study by the IMF which tried to estimate the subsidy that energy corporations get from governments. The total was colossal. I think it was around $5 trillion annually. That’s got nothing to do with markets and capitalism.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important-if not the most important-phenomena of modern capitalist economy.

There are all the activist groups on every imaginable topic – solidarity groups, environmental and feminist groups – sectors of these movements do very valuable work.

I would like to stress here that a lasting peace in the Chechen republic and so-called peace talks with the bandits are not the same thing, and I would ask everyone to make no mistake about that.

The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.

Once his wife goes to sleep it takes a minor nuclear explosion to wake her.

Tell a thousand people to draft a letter, let them debate every phrase, and see how long it takes and what you get.

I’m actually proud because I beat [the] Clinton dynasty. I beat [the] Bush dynasty. Now I guess, hopefully I’m in the process of beating very dishonest intelligence because, what they did was incredible.

The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations industry, which named Obama ‘Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008,’ easily beating out Apple computers. A good predictor of the elections a few weeks later. The industry’s regular task is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices, thus undermining markets as they are conceptualized in economic theory, but benefiting the masters of the economy. And it recognizes the benefits of undermining democracy in much the same way, creating uninformed voters who make often irrational choices between the factions of the business party that amass sufficient support from concentrated private capital to enter the electoral arena, then to dominate campaign propaganda.

Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.

The introduction, for example, of restrictive tariffs on steel, on aluminum, not only for Europe but also for Canada and Mexico, in essence these are also sanctions… They are related to the pragmatic national interests of the United States.

The political and social history of Western democracies records all sorts of efforts to ensure that the formal mechanisms are little more than wheels spinning idly. The goal is to eliminate public meddling in policy formation.

We also entered into what’s now called the sixth extinction, a rapid extinction of species, which is comparable to the fifth extinction 65 million years ago when an asteroid, huge asteroid, hit the Earth, we know.

I think: the powers like to talk about ‘freedom’ in order to wash the population’s brains.

..reading a book doesn’t mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.