Noam Chomsky

If it’s wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.

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.

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?

Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you’re saying, because it’s too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you’ve resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, ‘You’re an asshole,’ which maybe he or she is, and if you don’t say, ‘That’s idiotic,’ when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.

A truly independent press rejects the role of subordination to power and authority. It casts the orthodoxy to the winds, questions what “right-thinking people will accept without question,” tears aside the veil of tacit censorship…

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category-except for the category of familiarity.

My parents told me that children were taken from their families in 1941, and my mother had a child taken from her – with the goal of saving him.

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

I was at the Battle of Britain memorial yesterday. I was there out of respect for that amazing moment in British history. I was also thinking about my family, my mum and dad who were there at that time in London, and worked as air raid wardens during the Blitz, and I was thinking about that. It was a respectful ceremony, and I stood in respect throughout it. […] The issue is that we had a memorial for the Battle of Britain, I was there, I showed respect for it, and I’ll show respect in the proper way at all future events.

The devastating punch we took on September 11th still reverberates throughout American society.

We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used, not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.

Since the white working class cannot be mobilized to support the class enemy on the basis of their actual programs, the ‘radical insurgency’ called ‘the Republican Party’ appeals to its constituency on what are called ‘social-cultural issues’: religion, fear, racism, nationalism.

Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

To assert that we desire to bring about revolution in other countries, by interfering with their lives, is to speak of something which does not exist and which we never preach.

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

The political and social history of Western democracies records all sorts of efforts to ensure that the formal mechanisms are little more than wheels spinning idly. The goal is to eliminate public meddling in policy formation.

I believe that government is the servant of the people and not their master.

An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.

Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.