Noam Chomsky

As a marketing society, the US is to an unusual degree based on propaganda. The public relations industry, which is a huge industry, is a US-invented industry which spends billions of dollars on what they call ‘controlling the public mind’.

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

When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.

The option preferred by the privileged is for the fate of everyone else to be in the hands of insurance company executives whose goal, as Milton Friedman can explain, is to ensure maximum profit and market share: meaning the worst possible health care.

Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another. For example, I think about 90% of the forces that the British used to control India were Indians.

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.

I think I could have stopped it because I have very tough illegal immigration policies, and people aren’t coming into this country unless they’re vetted and vetted properly.

There was no collusion. Everybody knows there was no collusion.

It’s a very good question, very direct, and I’m not going to answer it.

Don’t be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.

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

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

The business world was pretty upset by the advances in public welfare in the ’60s, in particular by Richard Nixon – it’s not too well understood, but he was the last New Deal president, and they regarded that as class treachery.

If the nation is not capable of preserving itself and reproducing, if it loses it vital bearings and ideals, then it doesn’t need foreign enemies – it will fall apart on its own.

Arafat’s departure has created an awesome opportunity.

A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that’s more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity…and therefore I think that it’s, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.

When [Lenin] became the leader, he didn’t waste much time, and Trotsky helped him, in instituting a pretty repressive regime with the basic elements of Stalinism. They moved pretty quickly to dismantle most of the organs of popular power.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, with the ending of the Warsaw Pact mutual defence strategy, was the obvious time for Nato to have been disbanded.

We get the leaders we vote for. We get the policies we vote for. And when we don’t vote, that’s when we wind up with government of, by and for other people.

If Stain was such a bad guy why do all these people attribute to him quotes he didn’t make or change his actual quotes just enough to make them seem bad? Seem bad rather than visionary.

You read so much about China, you read so much about other countries, we have the great brain power right in this country, I’m proud to say. You’re certainly a member of that group.