Noam Chomsky

The idea of neutral objectivity is at best misleading and often fraudulent. We cannot help but approach complex and controversial questions – especially those of human significance – with a definite point of view, with an ax to grind if you like…

This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars – they would think the country has gone insane.

Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.

The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.

Europe has not been a heterogenous society to anything like the extent that the United States has. Nor has it been as mobile a society as the United States. These matters have been a bit under the cover, but they’re harder to keep under the cover.

At the end of the day, when it comes time to make that decision, as president, all you have to guide you are your values, and your vision, and the life experiences that make you who you are.

If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I’m a professor at MIT, that’s nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past.

I wouldn’t have the Presidency or any political office-don’t want anything to do with it nor have politics have anything to do with me.

The difference between a good govt. system and its poor administration is easily explained; the chief administrators are not Bosses in the best sense.

We ought to approach this challenge [of global warming] with a sense of profound joy and gratitude: that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future.

Power without a nation’s confidence is nothing.

When our interests matched, the Americans have been good to us, and when the interests differed, they wanted us to mold ourselves to them, which we refused.

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

Iraq is a small but very proud nation.

[Governments are] …without exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.

Chechnya is part and parcel of the Russian Federation.

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.

One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening. And we walked like that for our whole life.

Let’s not talk about Communism. Communism was just an idea, just pie in the sky.