Noam Chomsky

For many years, election campaigns here have been run by the public relations industry and each time it’s with increasing sophistication. Quite naturally, the industry uses the same technique to sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs.

It was not known in 1945 that we were not only entering the nuclear age, but entering a new geological epoch, what geologists call the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity is having severe and deleterious effects on the environment in which human and other life can survive.

And [Saudi Arabia] is strongly backed by the United States and its allies, Britain and France. Reason? It’s got a lot of oil. It’s got a lot of money. You can sell them a lot of arms, I think tens of billions of dollars of arms.

GATT and NAFTA ought to be called “investor rights agreements,” not “free trade agreements.” One of their main purposes is to extend the ability of corporations to carry out market-distorting operations internally.

These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.

With complex integrated supply chains, subcontracting and other such devices, corporate ownership of the world’s wealth is becoming a more realistic measure of global power than national wealth…

The media may feel obligated to carry extremely dubious stories and mute criticism in order not to offend their sources and disturb a close relationship. It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers.

The point [of the PR industry] is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information-and similarly, to undermine democracy by the same method.

If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?

Remember how the first world war broke out. It broke out as a result of the desire to redivide the world.

I don’t blame China, I blame the incompetence of past Admins for allowing China to take advantage of the U.S. on trade leading up to a point where the U.S. is losing $100’s of billions. How can you blame China for taking advantage of people that had no clue? I would’ve done same!

The Israeli lobby has clout in the U.S., which means that re-arranging the region and controlling its resources one way or another, will serve Israel through its control over the American administration.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Thousands of mercenaries, who have trained in camps on the territory of Chechnya as well as come in from abroad, are actually preparing to impose extremist ideas on the whole world.

Business power is very far from benign and it’s completely unaccountable. It’s a totalitarian system that has an enormous effect on our lives. It’s also the main reason why the government isn’t benign.

The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show)…Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that.

While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors, he is a moral coward.

Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.

We’re going to be campaigning on issues of social justice and poverty, you will be seeing a lot of me.

My life’s work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.

When you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.