Noam Chomsky

Karl Marx said, ‘The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.’ A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another. For example, I think about 90% of the forces that the British used to control India were Indians.

The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.

If you go back far enough, [socialism] meant basically control of production by producers, elimination of wage labor, democratization of all spheres of life; production, commerce, education, media, workers’ control in factories, community control of communities, and so on.

In fact, only two groups are allowed to be class-conscious in the United States. One of them is the business community, which is rabidly class-conscious…The other group is the high planning sectors of the government.

Yes, life in Chechnya so far looks more like a life after a natural disaster.

In fact, the belief that neurophysiology is even relevant to the functioning of the mind is just hypothesis. Who knows if we’re looking at the right aspects of the brain at all. Maybe there are other aspects of the brain that nobody has even dreamt of looking at yet. That’s often happened in the history of science. When people say that the mental is the neurophysiological at a higher level, they’re being radically unscientific. We know a lot about the mental from a scientific point of view. We have explanatory theories that account for a lot of things. The belief that neurophysiology is implicated in these things could be true, but we have every little evidence for it. So, it’s just a kind of hope; look around and you see neurons; maybe they’re implicated.

[on Jeremy Cobyn] It is a different type of Labour Party. Can it be taken back? I don’t know

What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy.

I am Syrian, I was made in Syria, I have to live in Syria and die in Syria.

If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed a line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justifications.

Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was ‘the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’

American Communists have the opportunity to preach freely their ideas. It would be absolutely wrong to hold the Soviet government responsible for activities of the American Communists.

He who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart; he who wants to revive it in its previous form has no head.

I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.

As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.

Throughout the two leadership campaigns I read quite a lot of Oscar Wilde.

In archaeology you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy you cover the known.

Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.

We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism.