Noam Chomsky

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Think of the feudal system. You had kings and princes and bishops and lords and so on. They for the most part did not want power to be totally concentrated, they didn’t want total tyrants.

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you’re saying, because it’s too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you’ve resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, ‘You’re an asshole,’ which maybe he or she is, and if you don’t say, ‘That’s idiotic,’ when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.

There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience.

I think one can give a good argument that looting isn’t violence at all. In a sense, most of us are looters, or at any rate we are benefiting from others’ looting.

In fact, in my view, if the managers of the propaganda system were more intelligent, they would allow more leeway to real dissidents and critics. Because it still wouldn’t make much of a difference, given the overwhelming weight of propaganda on the other side…

I think we need more young people; we need to elect young people to government. We need to give them a chance, in the media, in politics, in democracy.

Homelessness in the UK is wholly unnescessary.

To those who oppose us, we say, ‘Strike the woman, and you strike the rock.’

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.

George Orwell wrote that nationalists, who are practically the whole intellectual class of a country, not only do not disapprove of the crimes of their own state, but have the remarkable capacity not even to see them.

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.

Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best things to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we’re doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

It is difficult to say which is more menacing. But both of [points of war danger -Japan and Germany] exist and both are smoldering. In comparison with these two principal focal points of the war danger, the Italo-Ethiopian war represents an episode.

..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.

It’s a very good question, very direct, and I’m not going to answer it.

The culture and ideology fostered in this globalization process relate largely to “lifestyle” themes and goods and their acquisition; and they tend to weaken any sense of community helpful to civic life.

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…