Noam Chomsky

So the fear of drugs and the fear of crime is very much stimulated by state and business propaganda. The National Justice Commission repeatedly points out that crime in the United States, while sort of high, is not off the spectrum for industrialized societies.

Social Security is actually in pretty good shape despite what everybody screams about. But if you can defund it, it won’t be in good shape. And there is a standard technique of privatization, namely defund what you want to privatize.

…there is definitely a sector of the population that considers themselves threatened by big forces, ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Council on Foreign Relations to big government to who knows what and are calling for guns to protect themselves.

There was a recent study by the IMF which tried to estimate the subsidy that energy corporations get from governments. The total was colossal. I think it was around $5 trillion annually. That’s got nothing to do with markets and capitalism.

It’s not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures- it’s inevitable. But unless the process that is taking place here and elsewhere in the country and around the world, unless that continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars – they would think the country has gone insane.

There’s a lot of debate about what’s happening in the Labour party at the present time. And I am inundated with questions, questions, questions all the time. And I have patience that is infinite to answer questions, questions, questions. But one I got today really did puzzle me. They said: how are you coping with the pressure that’s on you? I simply said this: ‘There is no pressure on me. None whatsoever.’ The real pressure, the real pressure – real pressure – is when you don’t have enough money to feed your kids, when you don’t have a roof over your head, when you’re wondering if you’re going to be cared for. When you’re wondering how you can survive. You’re wondering how you’re going to cope with the debts you’ve incurred … That is the real pressure in our society. For those people struggling on low pay, struggling on zero-hours contracts, not knowing what’s coming from one week to the other, not knowing if they’ll be able to pay the rent, not knowing if they’re going to be homeless, not knowing if their children will end up in care, that’s the kind of brutal pressure that’s put on people every day of the week in this country.

The idea of neutral objectivity is at best misleading and often fraudulent. We cannot help but approach complex and controversial questions – especially those of human significance – with a definite point of view, with an ax to grind if you like…

But Klaus Barbie was basically small potatoes. Operation Paper Clip was a big operation, involving many top Nazis. We managed to get Walter Rauff, the guy who created the gas chambers, off to Chile. Others went to fascist Spain.

If you want to preserve – I’m very serious now – if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.

[Mexico] ripping off the US more than almost any other nation

Terrorism has once again shown it is prepared deliberately to stop at nothing in creating human victims. An end must be put to this. As never before, it is vital to unite forces of the entire world community against terror.

I feel like everyone else in this country today. I am utterly devastated.

Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.

When I see people go at the President, why not try love, for one person to stand up against all odds and just hug somebody the way that Alice Johnson hugged her family when she got out of jail?.

Scholars per se do not have deeper political insights than other persons and are not morally superior to others. But they are obligated to help politicians seek and find the truth.

Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as they make the workers pay

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

I’m using the term “First Spouse” instead of First Lady because I believe we will have a woman president.

Stalin is the most popular figure in all of Russia.

It’s not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t.