Noam Chomsky

When the interests of the privileged and powerful are the guiding commitment of both political factions, people who do not share these interests tend to stay home.

Not only were [the British] able to break into China for the first time, but also the profits from opium supported the Raj, the costs of the British Navy, and provided very significant capital which fueled the industrial revolution in England.

Take a look at Marx’s work. Very deep, analytic critique of a variety of capitalism, capitalist markets, properties, imperialism and so on, but about the future society a couple of scattered sentences, and I think, my guess is for good reasons.

So for example, worker- and community- controlled enterprises are germs of a future society within the present one. And those not only can be developed, but are being developed.

Poor people are basically superfluous for wealth production, and therefore the wealthy want to get rid of them. The rich also frighten everyone else, because if you’re afraid of these people, then you submit to state authority.

WE are good, and THEY are evil. That useful principle trumps virtually any argument. Analysis of commentary and much of scholarship reveals that its roots commonly lie in that crucial principle, which is not argued but asserted.

Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.

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

The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.

When asked for your views, by the press or others, remember that what they really want to know is the President’s views.

Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Exchange, fair or unfair,always presupposes and includes the rule of the bourgeoisie.

Nothing will bring American sympathy along with us so much as American blood shed in the field.

Few people understand the magnitude of the catastrophe that happened late in the 1980s when the Communist Party had failed to modernize the Soviet Union.

Starting reforms in the Soviet Union was only possible from above, only from above. Any attempt to go from below was suppressed, suppressed in a most resolute way.

The international monetary fund recently [2014] did a study in which it concluded that virtually the entire profit of the big banks comes from the government insurance policy.

In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did.

John McCain fought in Vietnam – I think that he has enough civilian blood on his hands.

The drug war not only gets rid of the superfluous population, it frightens everybody else. Drugs play a role similar to communism or terrorism, people huddle beneath the umbrella of authority for protection from the menace.

I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.