Noam Chomsky

Exaggerating slightly, in totalitarian countries the state decides the official line and everyone must then comply. Democratic societies operate differently. The line is never presented as such, merely implied. This involves brainwashing people who are still at liberty.

Just take a look at the Nazi conquest of nice, civilized Western Europe….Who was rounding up the Jews? Local people, often. In France they were rounding them up faster than the Nazis could handle them. The Nazis also used Jews to control Jews.

How it is we have so much information, but know so little?

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.

No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as ’embedded.’ To say, ‘I’m an embedded journalist’ is to say, ‘I’m a government Propagandist.

So investors don’t go down to the television studio and make sure that the local talk show host or news director is doing what they want. On the other hand, there are other complex mechanisms which make it fairly certain that they will do what the owners and investors want.

The history of US foreign policy, especially after World War II, is pretty much defined by the subversion and overthrow of foreign regimes, including parliamentary regimes, and the resort to violence to destroy popular organizations…

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.

The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations industry, which named Obama ‘Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008,’ easily beating out Apple computers. A good predictor of the elections a few weeks later. The industry’s regular task is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices, thus undermining markets as they are conceptualized in economic theory, but benefiting the masters of the economy. And it recognizes the benefits of undermining democracy in much the same way, creating uninformed voters who make often irrational choices between the factions of the business party that amass sufficient support from concentrated private capital to enter the electoral arena, then to dominate campaign propaganda.

There is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.

I’d be the world’s worst drinker!

The ability to compromise is not a diplomatic politeness toward a partner but rather taking into account and respecting your partner’s legitimate interests.

[on his SNL performance wearing a MAGA hat] They bullied me backstage. They said don’t go out there with that hat on. They bullied me backstage. They bullied me.

Do you remember the tsar? Well, I‘m like a tsar.

My first four jobs were minimum wage or close to it.

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

When we analyze this war in a materialistic way and ask when is it going to end and who will be the winner and the loser, it means that we do not see the endgame.

Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them, and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But, if men be bad, let the government be ever so good, they will endeavor to warp and spoil it to their turn.

Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan, ‘You’re either with us or against us.’