Noam Chomsky

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.

In a Canadian-style insurance system, the costs are distributed in the same way that taxes are. If the tax system is progressive…then the wealthy will also pay more of the costs of health care.

There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term ‘conservatism’ can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country’s future.

It’s important to remember that the constitutional system was not designed in the first place to defend the rights of people. Rather, the rights of people had to be balanced, as Madison put it, against what he called ‘the rights of property.’

Patrick Cockburn…has correctly pointed out that what he calls the Wahhabisation of Sunni Islam, the spread of Saudi extremist Wahhabi doctrine over Sunni Islam, the Sunni world, is one of the real disasters of modern-of the modern era.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

I may find Saddam Hussein’s regime abhorrent – any normal person would – but the survival of it is in his hands.

If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven’t done much today.

As soon as one identifies, challenges and overcomes illegitimate power, he or she is an anarchist. Most people are anarchists. What they call themselves doesn’t matter to me.

We have to fight. We have to fight against propaganda and crackpot conspiracy theories. We have to fight isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. We have to defeat those who would worsen our divisions. We have to remind our sons and daughters that we became the most powerful nation on Earth by tearing down walls, not building them.

These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.

Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

Lincoln said you cannot be President without spending some item on your knees. I have repeated that and a bunch of Atheists got all over me. Wait a minute. Does that mean that you cannot be President if you are an Atheist? I say yea that does mean that.

If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?

It is necessary sometimes to take one step backward to take two steps forward.

It is quite possible-overwhelmingly probable, one might guess-that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

The ability to ignore unwanted facts is one of the prerogatives of unchallenged power. Closely related is the right to radically revise history.

The Obama policies [2016] are to try to pressure Mexico to keep Central American immigrants from coming anywhere near us. Who are the Central American immigrants? These are people fleeing from the wreckage left by US government policies.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.

If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves.

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