Noam Chomsky

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

By now, about seventy percent of the population is literally disenfranchised. They’re the lower seventy percent on the income/wealth scale. Their political representatives simply pay no attention to them, so it doesn’t matter what they think.

Top [U.S.] planners recognized that if we can control Middle East oil we can control the world. If you have your hand on the spigot you can control what other people do, whether we use it or not.

For submissiveness to become a reliable trait, it must be entrenched in every realm. The public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.

The word terrorism has a meaning, it is defined in the US and international law and so on. But that’s not the definition we are allowed to use. We use the word terrorism in a way which means there’s terrorism against us but not our terrorism against them. That’s not terrorism. So for example, if we use the word “terrorism” in its litteral meaning, the most extreme terrorist operation in the world today would be Obama’s global assassination campaign, the drone campaign

Much research, including a widely quoted Rand Corporation study of 1994, has shown that prevention and treatment are considerably more cost-effective than the coercive [drug war] measures that receive the bulk of funding. Such nonpunitive measures are also of course far more humane.

The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjuration of force in the settlement of disputes between states; the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; the safeguarding of international peace and security.

Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out.

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.

Freedom without opportunity is a devil’s gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal.

Good laws make it easier to do right and harder to do wrong.

Secretary Powell and I agree on every single issue that has ever been before this administration except for those instances where Colin’s still learning.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

When the victims are classified as less than human … Communists, terrorists, or whatever may be the contemporary term of art – their extermination raises no moral qualms. And the agents of extermination are praiseworthy moderates-our Nazis …

When cutting staff at the Pentagon, don’t eliminate the thin layer that assures civilian control.

I cannot forgive him [Nelson Mandela] for accepting the Nobel Peace Prize with his jailer De Klerk. Hand in hand they went. Do you think De Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed.

Organization and education, when they interact with each other, they strengthen each other, they are mutually supportive.

Large corporate advertisers on TV will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from 3rd World tyrannies.

Ultimately it’s a question of whether democracy is going to be allowed to exist, and to what extent. And it’s entirely natural that the business world, along with the state, which they largely dominate, would want to limit democracy. It threatens them.

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

Grotesque as the Soviet empire was, its very existence offered a certain space for non-alignment, and for perfectly cynical reasons, it sometimes provided assistance to victims of Western attack. Those options are gone, and the South is suffering the consequences.