Noam Chomsky

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.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

Big institutions, like Goldman Sachs really don’t have to worry much about systemic risk because we don’t have a market system. So therefore they can run cap in hand to the nanny state and say ‘bail me out’ and that’s what happens.

Of course there are differences, but they are not fundamental. Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

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.

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.

Radicals can be found in any environment.

We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

The executive branch tries to follow policies of plausible deniability, which means that messages are given to the CIA to do things but without a paper trail, without a record. When the story comes out later it looks as if the CIA is doing things on their own.

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy.

Other human rights atrocities from African slavery to the killing fields of Cambodia, the Armenian and Rwandan Genocides are all of course to be remembered, but diluting their particularity or comparing degrees of evil does no good.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.

The internet is an élite organization; most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.

One of they key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace. Good people don’t go into government.

In line with international law, only the U.N. Security Council could sanction the use of force against a sovereign state. Any other pretext or method which might be used to justify the use of force against an independent sovereign state are inadmissible and can only be interpreted as an aggression.

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‘Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?

Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.

For Russia, there is not and there may not be another political option but democracy. However, Russian democracy is… not at all the realization of standards imposed on us from outside.