Noam Chomsky

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.

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.

Capital punishment is a crime. I agree with Amnesty International on that one, and indeed with most of the world. The state should have no right to take people’s lives.

The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren’t being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.

It’s important to remember that the constitutional system was not designed in the first place to defend the rights of people. Rather, the rights of people had to be balanced, as Madison put it, against what he called ‘the rights of property.’

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

Once wide coercive powers are given to government agencies…such powers cannot be effectively controlled.

There are growing domestic social and economic problems, in fact, maybe catastrophes. Nobody in power has any intention of doing anything about them. If you look at the domestic programs of the administrations of the past ten years-I include here the Democratic opposition-there’s really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal populations, jails, deterioration in the inner cities – the whole raft of problems… In such circumstances you’ve got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this they may not like it, since they’re the ones suffering from it. Just having them watch the Superbowl and the sitcoms may not be enough. You have to whip them up into fear of enemies. In the 1930s Hitler whipped them into fear of the Jews and gypsies. You had to crush them to defend yourselves. We have our ways, too. Over the last ten years, every year ot two, some major monster is constructed that we have to defend ourselves against.,

The internet provides access to an extraordinary range of information, opinion, and interpretation. But as with any source, it is useful to the extent that it is used with discrimination and insight.

If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that its purpose? No it’s not.

We Marxists believe that revolution will occur in other countries, as well. But it will occur at a time when it will be considered possible or necessary by revolutionaries of those countries.

Public officials are all right if they stay in their proper sphere and perform their proper functions but when they get greedy for wider scope and more power and money they lose their value and become parasites.

Yes, life in Chechnya so far looks more like a life after a natural disaster.

If you think about the way the society works in general, it works pretty much the way the founding fathers said. The society should be governed by those who own it, and they intend to follow Adam Smith’s vile maxim. That’s at the core of things.

Germany is the place where when Hitler was the prime minister and supreme commander, he burned over six million Jews. This is because Hitler and all German people knew that Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the world and that is why they burned the Israelis alive with gas in the soil of Germany.

Politics in the true sense, have to do with the prosperity, peace and security of the people.

Americans have a severe disease – worse than AIDS. It’s called the winner’s complex.

The Obama policies [2016] are to try to pressure Mexico to keep Central American immigrants from coming anywhere near us. Who are the Central American immigrants? These are people fleeing from the wreckage left by US government policies.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system.

The strengthening of our statehood is, at times, deliberately interpreted as authoritarianism.