Noam Chomsky

The international monetary fund recently [2014] did a study in which it concluded that virtually the entire profit of the big banks comes from the government insurance policy.

But you really have to think through the talk about nonviolence. Sure, everybody’s in favor of nonviolence rather than violence, but under what conditions and when? Is it an absolute principle?

Right before the 2000 [U.S.] elections, about 75 percent regarded it as virtually meaningless, some game involving rich contributors, party managers, and candidates who are trained to project images that conceal issues, but might pick up some votes.

There was a recent study by the IMF which tried to estimate the subsidy that energy corporations get from governments. The total was colossal. I think it was around $5 trillion annually. That’s got nothing to do with markets and capitalism.

As the Cold War came to a definitive end, the Bush Administration created a Center for Defense Trade to stimulate arms sales while proposing government guarantees of up to $1 billion in loans for purchase of US arms.

The first [task of the Pentagon] is to preserve an international system in which what are called American interests – which primarily means business interests, can flourish.

The soviet people want full-blooded and unconditional democracy.

Like most technology, the internet has mixed effects. It’s a neutral instrument.

If wall street can borrow money at 0.75% interest, so can college students. We need to stop treating students as profit centers.

In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.

America will start winning again, winning like never before.

We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders.

To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to ‘moral equivalence,’ or ‘political correctness,’ or ‘the error of of atheism,’ or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.

Worry does not mean fear, but readiness for the confrontation.

I would prefer to think of anarchism as the libertarian left, and from that point of view anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist [Bakunin, Kropotkin and others.]

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.

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

We have more people than ever using foodbanks, we have a greater number of people being homeless and many people in housing stress.

There is no justification for the belief that, so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary…it is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.

One man with a gun can control 100 without one. … Make mass searches and hold executions for found arms.

The common good is the aspiration of all of us.