Noam Chomsky

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

I presume that each of us has the capacity to be a saint or a monster. The rest is up to us, although the circumstances of our lives impose complex conditions on such choices.

The media system protects itself with indignation against a challenge to the right of deceit in the service of power, and the very idea of subjecting the ideological system to rational inquiry elicits incomprehension or outrage, though it is often masked in other terms.

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it’s been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it’s over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

The business classes are very class-conscious-they’re constantly fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition. Occasionally this is recognized.

I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.

Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.

Just talk to me as a father – not what the Constitution says. What do you feel?

Based on our preliminary calculations, we may in the next six years spend 17 trillion roubles (Putin said billion, but meant trillion), but to achieve the goals that we have discussed, we will need an additional 8 trillion roubles. And it is clear where we are going to find them.

Be precise. A lack of precision is dangerous when the margin of error is small.

Letting agencies are unregulated. They charge a search fee, which in some cases can run into several hundred pounds, but the search consists of no more than checking through a computer database to see whether they have any properties for that person.

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

Protest actions and propaganda are two slightly different things.

The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

Advance towards socialism cannot but cause the exploiting elements to resist the advance, and the resistance of the exploiters cannot but lead to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle.

[Marx’s] picture was, as I understand it, that when working people liberate themselves, and can make their own decisions, they will determine what kind of society it will be. He is not going to dictate it to them. I think that’s a pretty wise stand frankly.

Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything – that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

I’m sure corruption in Chechnya is minimal.

I think one can give a good argument that looting isn’t violence at all. In a sense, most of us are looters, or at any rate we are benefiting from others’ looting.

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