Noam Chomsky

The New York Times, reported in 2009, that the Obama administration had made a secret deal with the pharmaceutical industry in which it promised not to allow the government to use its purchasing power to negotiate drug prices, as is done in every other country…

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.

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 Europeans destroyed what was in their way. That was true over almost the entire world, with very few exceptions. European wars were wars of extermination. If we were to be honest about that history, we would describe it simply as a barbarian invasion.

[Marx’s] picture was, as I understand it, that when working people liberate themselves, and can make their own decisions, they will determine what kind of society it will be. He is not going to dictate it to them. I think that’s a pretty wise stand frankly.

U.S. society doesn’t want to play the role of international policeman.

I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.

Within the reigning social order, the general public must remain an object of manipulation, not a participant in thought, debate, and decision.

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.

The Federal Government should be the last resort, not the first. Ask if a potential program is truly a federal responsibility or whether it can better be handled privately, by voluntary organizations, or by local or state governments.

In fact, only two groups are allowed to be class-conscious in the United States. One of them is the business community, which is rabidly class-conscious…The other group is the high planning sectors of the government.

One day we took each other by the hand and went for a walk in the evening. And we walked like that for our whole life.

All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.

We are not abandoning our convictions, our philosophy or traditions, nor do we urge anyone to abandon theirs.

Thomas Jefferson, another great figure, he said, well, we have no choice but to exterminate the indigenous population, the Native Americans; the reason is they’re attacking us. Why are they attacking us? Because we’re taking everything away from them.

I think the cost of energy will come down when we make this transition to renewable energy.

A free press is essential to our democracy, but much of our press isn’t very free at all.

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?

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.]

The Chechnya problem is a centuries-old problem. The thing is that today, fundamentalists and terrorists are exploiting those centuries-old problems to accomplish their own objectives that have nothing to do whatsoever with the interests of Chechnya.