Noam Chomsky

Well take, say a corporate executive By law, a corporate executive must work to increase the profitability of the corporation. Disregarding the effects that it has on others. That’s actually a legal principle and that’s psychopathic.

I would prefer to think of anarchism as the libertarian left, and from that point of view anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist [Bakunin, Kropotkin and others.]

Plainly, such an approach does not exclude other ways of trying to comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can consistently believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about how people think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than from all of naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the arts may offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire.

The Leninist antagonism to the most essential features of socialism was evident from the very start. Lenin and Trotsky, upon assuming power, immediately devoted themselves to destroying the liberatory potential of Soviets and factory committees.

About 70% of the public, the lowest 70% on the income scale, are pretty much disenfranchised. Their attitudes have no detectable influence on the policies of their own representatives. As you move up the scale you get a bit more influence. When you get to the top, policy is made.

[Marx’s] picture was, as I understand it, that when working people liberate themselves, and can make their own decisions, they will determine what kind of society it will be. He is not going to dictate it to them. I think that’s a pretty wise stand frankly.

The business classes are very class-conscious-they’re constantly fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition. Occasionally this is recognized.

In the modern world, those who are weak will get unambiguous advice from foreign visitors which way to go and what policy course to pursue.

The revolution does not need historians.

We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.

Our great African-American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.

Hizbullah is not a militia.

Have you read the things that were published in Moskovskiye Novosti and Ogonyok in those days? For instance, General Kalugin’s exposures? Kalugin is a traitor. I saw Kalugin during my time in Leningrad when he was deputy head of the Directorate. He was an absolute loafer. A loafer, perhaps, but he remembers you. He doesn’t remember anything. He does remember, and he says that from the point of view of the intelligence service, you worked in a province and had nothing to show for your performance. Oh, he doesn’t remember a thing. He couldn’t remember me. I had no contact with him, nor did I meet him. It is I who remembers him, because he was a big boss and everybody knew him. As to whether he knew me, there were hundreds of us.

This American government – what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.

Being president doesn’t change who you are – it reveals who you are.

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

It is difficult to say which is more menacing. But both of [points of war danger -Japan and Germany] exist and both are smoldering. In comparison with these two principal focal points of the war danger, the Italo-Ethiopian war represents an episode.

It’s perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

A fundamental goal of U.S. policy towards Latin America (and elsewhere), long-standing and well-documented, is to take control of the police and military so as to assure that the population will not act upon unacceptable ideas.

I believe there’s too little patience and context to many of the investigations I read or see on television.

Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.