Noam Chomsky

So…should we take our guns, go out in the street and start destroying Chase Manhattan bank. Well if you want to get killed in five minutes that’s a good suggestion. Other than that it has absolutely nothing to do with the world so there is not any point in even discussing it.

Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.

[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.

Earlier in the twentieth century some critics called fascism capitalism with the gloves off, meaning that fascism was pure capitalism without democratic rights and organizations.

Now the shift is toward trying to keep taxes just on wages and on consumption – which everyone has to do – not, say, on dividends, which only go to the rich. And that’s shifted the burden enormously.

The official mission of NATO was changed to become to be-to control and safeguard the global energy system, sea lanes, pipelines and so on. And, of course, on the side, it’s acting as an intervention force for the United States.

Russia does not and cannot have any political choice but democracy. I want to say, and even stress, that we share those universal democratic principles taken around the whole world.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

Or stay in Chechnya and wait to be attacked? What should we do? I have said what we must do. We must go through the mountain caves and scatter and destroy all those who are armed. Perhaps after the presidential elections, we should introduce direct presidential rule there for a couple of years. We must rebuild the economy and the social services, show the people that normal life is possible. We must pull the young generation out of the environment of violence in which it is living. We must put a program of education in place . . . We must work. We must not abandon Chechnya as we did before. In fact, we did a criminal thing back then, when we abandoned the Chechen people and undermined Russia. Now we must work hard, and then transfer to full fledged political procedures, allowing them and us to decide how we can coexist. It is unavoidable fact: We must live together. We have no plans to deport Chechens, as Stalin once solved the problem. And Russia has no other choice. Nobody can impose a solution on us by force but we are prepared to take maximum consideration of Chechen

I can remember from childhood, that there were neighborhoods where if you went, you’d be beaten up. You weren’t supposed to be there. The people who were doing it — kids — felt justified and righteous about it. They were defending their turf. What else do they have to defend?

As important as it is to change the lightbulbs, it is more important to change the laws.

It was not known in 1945 that we were not only entering the nuclear age, but entering a new geological epoch, what geologists call the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity is having severe and deleterious effects on the environment in which human and other life can survive.

My use of social media is not presidential – it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!

Like most technology, the internet has mixed effects. It’s a neutral instrument.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

Our great power does not mean we can do whatever we want whenever we want, nor should we assume we have all the wisdom and knowledge necessary to succeed.

It’s Russia some people would like to get rid of. They are still afraid of our nuclear deterrent. We have our own foreign policy whether they like it or not.

My guess is that you would find that the intellectual elite is the most heavily indoctrinated sector [of society], for good reasons. It’s their role as a secular priesthood to really believe the nonsense that they put forth. Other people can repeat it, but it’s not that crucial that they really believe it. But for the intellectual elite themselves, it’s crucial that they believe it because, after all, they are the guardians of the faith. Except for a very rare person who’s an outright liar, it’s hard to be a convincing exponent of the faith unless you’ve internalized it and come to believe it.

[on Trump] He is a very bright person, talented without any doubt.

The bankruptcy of the Democrat elite is well-illustrated by the obsession with alleged Russian meddling with our sacred elections. Whatever it might amount to – apparently very little – it cannot begin to compare with the “meddling” of campaign funding…

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. … Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.