Noam Chomsky

You don’t get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.

Scholars per se do not have deeper political insights than other persons and are not morally superior to others. But they are obligated to help politicians seek and find the truth.

As long as people are marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads.

In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to these policies. As is most of the population.

The Drug War is an effort to stimulate fear of dangerous people from who we have to protect ourselves. It is also, a direct form of control of what are called “dangerous classes,” those superfluous people who don’t really have a function contributing to profit-making and wealth.

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.

When I see people go at the President, why not try love, for one person to stand up against all odds and just hug somebody the way that Alice Johnson hugged her family when she got out of jail?.

We won the Electoral College by a lot: 306 to 223, I believe. And that was a well-fought — that was a well-fought battle. We did a great job.

The only real power comes out of a long rifle.

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.

The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.

I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment-which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of scepticism that this violence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved.

In the middle of a recession, where we’re just climbing out of it, where the economy -unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster.

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

But we’re at a place in our political history when passing legislation through the House with bipartisan support is considered by some folks a greater evil than the problem it’s intended to solve.

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.

So there was basically the same kind of conflict in Peter as Yeltsin had with the Supreme Soviet [parliament]? Yes. But it is important to note that there wasn’t the same division between the law-enforcement agencies that there had been in 1991. The FSB11 leadership-Viktor Cherkesov was the head-announced their support for the mayor from the start. The FSB introduced a number of measures advocating the arrest of extremists who were plotting provocations, planning to blow things up, or trying to destabilize the situation. And that was the end of it.

I’ve had a beautiful, I’ve had a flawless campaign. You’ll be writing books about this campaign.

Anarchism calls for an elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of tyranny that’s internal to private power concentrations. So why should we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than subordination. It’s better to be free than to be a slave.

As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.