Noam Chomsky

Freedom without opportunity is a devil’s gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise human science is at a loss.

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.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster’; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.

While capital is now highly mobile, labor is increasingly immobile – and that has immediate consequences. It means that it is easy to shift production to low-wage, high-repression areas of the world with low environmental standards.

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.

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

I believe all people are good. Some just do bad things. I had a teacher – God bless him, he died a few years ago -Luther H. Henson. I was a student of his at the time I lost my mother. He was my one person that seemed like anything I wanted to know, I could ask him and he’d give me an answer that was right. He told me, ‘There’ll come a time when people won’t judge you by your color; they’ll judge you by your deeds; how you act and how you treat people.’ Hearing professor Henson say that made me think, and I guess sort of toe the line a little bit more. And later on I heard Dr. King say, ‘I have a dream, where you’ll be judged not by the colour of the skin…’ Of course, I’d been a man for years when Dr. King came along, but it hit me hard because it strengthened for me what prof Henson had already said when I was a boy.

I discovered, for the first time but not the last, that politicians don’t care too much what things cost. It’s not their money.

Anarchism calls for an elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of tyranny that’s internal to private power concentrations. So why should we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than subordination. It’s better to be free than to be a slave.

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

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 I have said for many years throughout this land, we’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. Every bit of that has to change.

All of it was invented by people who oppose President Trump to undermine his legitimacy.- Vladimir Putin

This nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power.

You cannot take your freedoms for granted. Just like generations who have come before you, you have to do your part to preserve and protect those freedoms… you need to be preparing yourself to add your voice to our national conversation.

Protest actions and propaganda are two slightly different things.

There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.

I believe there’s too little patience and context to many of the investigations I read or see on television.

[on the 2016 election] When the most qualified person running was a woman, and look what we did instead, I mean that says something about where we are. That’s what we have to explore, because if we as women are still suspicious of one another, if we still have this crazy, crazy bar for each other that we don’t have for men… if we’re not comfortable with the notion that a woman could be our president compared to… what, then we have to have those conversations with ourselves as women.

I have a great relationship with African Americans, as you possibly have heard. I just have great respect for them. And they like me. I like them.