Noam Chomsky

The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.

The House Armed Services Committee a couple of years ago described the role of Congress as that of a sometimes querulous but essentially kindly uncle who complains while furiously puffing on his pipe but who finally, as everyone expects, gives in and hands over the allowance.

Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.

The real surprise in the [2016] election was the Sanders campaign, which broke with a long tradition of pretty much bought elections, and was stopped only by machinations of the Obama-Clinton party managers.

A fundamental goal of U.S. policy towards Latin America (and elsewhere), long-standing and well-documented, is to take control of the police and military so as to assure that the population will not act upon unacceptable ideas.

So the indigenous population of what’s now the United States was ‘exterminated’, to use the word that the founding fathers used. Not totally, but that was what was considered the right thing to do. They replaced them and it became a kind of settler state, not an imperial state.

A figure who receives money from abroad for his political work, and thus serves some foreign interest, cannot be a politician in Russia.

The point [of the PR industry] is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information-and similarly, to undermine democracy by the same method.

I mean, the Pentagon is in no sense a defense department. It has never defended the United States from anyone. It has only served to conduct aggression. And I think that the American people would be much better off without a Pentagon.

This world was not created piecemeal. Africa was born no later and no earlier than any other geographical area on this globe. Africans, no more and no less than other men, possess all human attributes, talents and deficiencies, virtues and faults.

Well, I’m telling them two things. One is that, look, this is going to be something when the American people realize – once it’s passed – that, A, it does take care of preexisting conditions; B, you’re insurance rates aren’t going to skyrocket; C, the insurance companies aren’t going to be running the show like they were before; D, you’re going to be in a position where you can keep your insurance that you have. That once the American public realizes that, you’re going to get a reward for this. They’re going to be rewarded.

When I hear people say, ‘you run,’ it’s part of the problem. We still didn’t get ‘yes we can’ right. It’s not ‘yes you can,’ it’s ‘yes we can.’ And until we get that right, it doesn’t matter who runs.

The Leninist antagonism to the most essential features of socialism was evident from the very start. Lenin and Trotsky, upon assuming power, immediately devoted themselves to destroying the liberatory potential of Soviets and factory committees.

CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. … Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past.

This notion of being “anti-American” is quite an interesting one-it’s actually a totalitarian notion-it isn’t used in free societies…as far as I know, we are the only democratic society where the concept isn’t just ridiculed.

Hitler wanted to destroy Russia- everyone needs to remember how that ended

Socialism means keeping account of everything. You will have socialism if you take stock of every piece of iron and cloth.

When they go low, we go high.

I am the hero of Africa.

The Middle East is hopeful. There’s hope there.

While greatly honored internationally, Mandela remained on the US terrorist list until 2008, when at last a congressional resolution allowed him to enter the ‘land of the free’ without special dispensation.