Noam Chomsky

Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as death squads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps.

Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these are mostly developments of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the ‘60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded.

My response to the end of Soviet tyranny was similar to my reaction to the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini. In all cases, it is a victory for the human spirit. It should have been particularly welcome to socialists, since a great enemy of socialism had at last collapsed.

As the Cold War came to a definitive end, the Bush Administration created a Center for Defense Trade to stimulate arms sales while proposing government guarantees of up to $1 billion in loans for purchase of US arms.

Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category-except for the category of familiarity.

{on Mexico] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

[living at the White House] This isn’t about us. There’s so much history here that no one family can claim this space as their own.

Well, the Washington consensus – which is basically designed for the Third World to make it that way, and keep it that way – it’s now being applied not just to the Third World countries, but to the rich industrial societies, with the United States and Britain in the lead.

Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.

Preventing the conflicts of tomorrow means changing the mindsets of the youth of today.

…there is definitely a sector of the population that considers themselves threatened by big forces, ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Council on Foreign Relations to big government to who knows what and are calling for guns to protect themselves.

U.S. and Canada were completely isolated from the rest of the hemisphere on two issues. One was admission of Cuba into hemispheric systems. The second was the drug war, which Latin America are essentially the victims of the drug war.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy.

In the execution of Presidential decisions work to be true to his views, in fact and tone.

The Russian people have their own cultural code, their own tradition.

Citizenship means every four years you put a mark somewhere and you go home and let other guys run the world. It’s a very destructive ideology.

I think I’d be a better president because I was in combat.

We are not abandoning our convictions, our philosophy or traditions, nor do we urge anyone to abandon theirs.

The Eurasian union is a project meant to preserve the identities of nations and the historic Eurasian community in the new century, in a new world.

U.S. society doesn’t want to play the role of international policeman.