Noam Chomsky

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

If it’s wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.

Think of the feudal system. You had kings and princes and bishops and lords and so on. They for the most part did not want power to be totally concentrated, they didn’t want total tyrants.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media.

But facts and logic matter little. The Democrats are bent on revenge for their 2016 failure, having run such a rotten campaign that what looked like a ‘sure thing’ collapsed. Evidently, Trump’s severe assault against the common good is a lesser matter, at least to the party elite.

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.

[on Trump] But there are some pretty stable elements of his ideology, if you can even grant him that concept. One of them is: “Climate change is not taking place.” As he puts it: “Forget it.” And that’s almost a death knell for the species – not tomorrow, but the decisions we take now are going to affect things in a couple of decades, and in a couple of generations it could be catastrophic.

The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the [“The US Donor Relief Act of 2017”] will add $1 trillion to deficits over the next decade. Virtually every economist generally agrees. But not 80 percent of Republican voters…

When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.

Take some exercise, try to recover the look of a human being.

Israeli interests are not necessarily in harmony with the American interests.

When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: Why do I care if my high school’s team wins the football game? I don’t know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me… why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense. But the point is, it does make sense: It’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it’s training in irrational jingoism. That’s also a feature of competitive sports.

When cutting staff at the Pentagon, don’t eliminate the thin layer that assures civilian control.

In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to these policies. As is most of the population.

Treat each federal dollar as if it was hard earned; it was – by a taxpayer.

Power without a nation’s confidence is nothing.

China and North Korea have already proposed that North Korea freeze its nuclear and missile programs. The proposal, though, was rejected at once by Washington…because…[the proposal] calls on the U.S. to halt its threatening military exercises on North Korea’s borders…

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

My parents told me that children were taken from their families in 1941, and my mother had a child taken from her – with the goal of saving him.

I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any treat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the ‘engineering of consent’ by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.