Noam Chomsky

We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.

But the rich countries of the world-the United States, European Union-the ones who have an overwhelming responsibility for the circumstances from which the refugees are fleeing, they can’t help with it. They can’t deal with it. Too much for us. Go somewhere else.

Trump does have a base, a voter base. He’s kicking them in the face with abandon. And the idea is: How do you hold onto them while you’re doing this? Not an easy trick. And this, I think, is part of the con.

I think one can give a good argument that looting isn’t violence at all. In a sense, most of us are looters, or at any rate we are benefiting from others’ looting.

…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 educational system was a highly predictable victim of the neoliberal reaction, guided by the maxim of ‘private affluence and public squalor’. Funding for public education has sharply declined. Tuition has exploded, leading to a plague of unpayable student debt.

Journalism, as concerns collecting information, differs little if at all from intelligence work. In my judgment, a journalist’s job is very interesting.

One of your tasks is to separate the “personal” from the “substantive.” The two can become confused, especially if someone rubs the President wrong.

Using these unnamed sources, if done properly, carefully and fairly, provides more accountability in government.

Of course we as Labour Party members must all be free to criticise and oppose injustice and abuse wherever we find it. But as today’s Report recommends, can we please leave Hitler and Nazi metaphors alone (especially in the context of Israel). Why? Because the Shoah is still in people’s family experience.

To fear the world we have organized and led for three quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership, and our duty to remain the last, best hope of Earth, for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

The people of Aleppo have suffered like no one else for so long. There has to be a political solution.

In the future, there will be fewer but better Russians.

We have to fight. We have to fight against propaganda and crackpot conspiracy theories. We have to fight isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. We have to defeat those who would worsen our divisions. We have to remind our sons and daughters that we became the most powerful nation on Earth by tearing down walls, not building them.

Russia does not and cannot have any political choice but democracy. I want to say, and even stress, that we share those universal democratic principles taken around the whole world.

Legal aid is fundamentally important in a democratic, civilised society.

Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences…Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.

[on Trump] I’m puzzled by that. People who do it are inflicting damage to the country’s domestic political situation, incapacitating the president and showing a lack of respect to voters who cast their ballots for him.

The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing.

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

Military spending scarcely involves the public, but social spending does, and has a democratizing effect. For reasons like these, military spending is much preferred.