Noam Chomsky

Distress is so severe that among white middle-aged Americans, mortality is actually increasing, something unheard of in functioning societies apart from war or pestilence. There are similar phenomena in Europe under the ‘business first’ (‘neoliberal’/’austerity’) assault.

Don’t be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.

..people would like to think there’s somebody up there who knows what he’s doing. Since we don’t participate, we don’t control and we don’t even think about the questions of crucial importance, we hope somebody is paying attention who has some competence. Let’s hope the ship has a captain, in other words, since we’re not taking in deciding what’s going on. I think that’s a factor. But also, it is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues; they’d better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and control international affairs.

Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.

If you go back far enough, [socialism] meant basically control of production by producers, elimination of wage labor, democratization of all spheres of life; production, commerce, education, media, workers’ control in factories, community control of communities, and so on.

Why did the U.S. decide to normalize relations with Cuba?…Not a magnanimous gesture of courage to bring Cuba-to protect Cuba from its isolation, to save them from their isolation; quite the opposite, it was to save the U.S. from its isolation with the rest of the world.

Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?

The American way is the way most law-abiding, tax-paying Americans live-in debt. Does this make a balanced budget un-American?

The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

If it’s wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

…the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.

I certainly wouldn’t sign the more moderate [bill]. I need a bill that gives this country tremendous border security. I have to have that. We have to have the wall.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

It’s only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it’s not terrorism.

I will fight for you with every breath in my body – and I will never, ever let you down.

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.

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.

I seemed to be in a minority on every subject. Every argument that came up, every debate that came up, I was in a minority of one usually, sometimes two. That was quite character forming.

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.