Noam Chomsky

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

I would question the use of something as simplistic as IQ to come to any conclusions regarding human affairs.

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.

It didn’t take very many forces to destroy huge numbers of natives, not so much because the technology was better, but because the Europeans fought differently. If we were to be honest about the history, we would describe European colonialism simply as a barbarian invasion.

But that [‘friendly Fascism’] requires an honest ideologue, a Hitler type, not someone whose only detectable ideology is Me.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the ‘engineering of consent’ by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

The chief evil is unlimited government…nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.

I feel that [Trump] cares about the way black people feel about him, and he would like for black people to like him like they did when he was cool in the rap songs and all this.

On economic policy, in particular, the striking thing about the leadership contest was that every candidate other than Mr. Corbyn essentially supported the Conservative government’s austerity policies. … The Corbyn upset isn’t about a sudden left turn on the part of Labour supporters. It’s mainly about the strange, sad moral and intellectual collapse of Labour moderates.

In essence, they are sawing the branch on which they are sitting. This is counterproductive and damaging for those involved and for the global economy.

One could see that what you are writing was that today’s meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. Now, for the first time, I can tell you that you are a disaster.

The Russian people have unilaterally made their choice in direction of democracy in the early ’90s. They will not be led astray. Nobody should be having any doubts.

You must obey the law, always, not only when they grab you by your special place.

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.

Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.

Read, say, George Washington, a leading figure in the settler-colonial society we live in. His view was – his words – was that we have to ‘extirpate’ the Iroquois; they’re in our way. They were an advanced civilization.

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.

Divide the world into regional groups as a transitional stage to world government. Populations will more readily abandon their national loyalty to a vague regional loyalty than they will for a world authority. Later the regions can be brought together all the way into a single world dictatorship.

Edward Bernays’ first great achievement, that sort of made a star out of him, was a public relations campaign trying to get women to smoke. So he had models walking down Fifth Avenue smoking cigarettes and showing how it makes you beautiful and slim.

It was sort of important for us not to deal with a specific policy change, or a specific sort of approach, but to deal with cultural change.

Sometimes – history needs a push.