Noam Chomsky

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

If I were in a swing state, a state that matters, and the choice were Clinton or Trump, I would vote against Trump. And by arithmetic that means hold your nose and vote for Clinton.

The society to which we should aspire, I think, would respect the concept “jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen”: to each according to their needs. Among the primary needs for most people is a life of dignity and fulfillment.

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

When the interests of the privileged and powerful are the guiding commitment of both political factions, people who do not share these interests tend to stay home.

So for example, worker- and community- controlled enterprises are germs of a future society within the present one. And those not only can be developed, but are being developed.

I believe the measure of a man isn’t just the road he’s traveled; it’s the choices he’s made along the way.

Politics in the true sense, have to do with the prosperity, peace and security of the people.

Preventing the conflicts of tomorrow means changing the mindsets of the youth of today.

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 believe that President Trump of the United States does not need any advice because one has to possess certain talent and go through this trial to be elected, even without having the experience of such big administrative work. He has done this.

No one can match America. We have big hearts-and the courage to do what’s right. But we’re not the world’s policemen. And if we have to take on that role, we need to send a clear message that protection comes at a price. If other countries benefit from our armed forces protecting them, those countries should cover the costs. Period.

When cutting staff at the Pentagon, don’t eliminate the thin layer that assures civilian control.

The United States could become a color-free society. It’s possible. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but it’s perfectly possible that it would happen, and it wouldn’t change the political economy, hardly at all.

Anarcho-syndicalism took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, that they ought to control the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations…

There were gleeful reports in American military publications about the exciting spectacle of a huge flood of water wiping out the rice crops [in North Korea] on which “the Asian” depends for survival. They are very much worth reading, a useful part of historical memory.

So what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system, whether about the Cold War or the economic system or the national interest and so on, and then present a range of debate within that framework-so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is.

We have before us the examples of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. We must remember how long these required to achieve their union. When a solid foundation is laid, if the mason is able and his materials good, a strong house can be built.

The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense, and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which have already formed themselves before the revolution.

The system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.

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.