Noam Chomsky

I presume that each of us has the capacity to be a saint or a monster. The rest is up to us, although the circumstances of our lives impose complex conditions on such choices.

So the indigenous population of what’s now the United States was ‘exterminated’, to use the word that the founding fathers used. Not totally, but that was what was considered the right thing to do. They replaced them and it became a kind of settler state, not an imperial state.

About 70% of the public, the lowest 70% on the income scale, are pretty much disenfranchised. Their attitudes have no detectable influence on the policies of their own representatives. As you move up the scale you get a bit more influence. When you get to the top, policy is made.

If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I’m a professor at MIT, that’s nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

China’s refusal to accept opium from Britain’s Indian colony was denounced by John Quincy Adams as a violation of the Christian principle of ‘love thy neighbor’ and ‘an enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations’.

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

I don’t respond in any way to personal abuse that is thrown at me.

Europeans are dying out. Don’t you understand that? And same-sex marriages don’t produce children. Do you want to survive by drawing migrants? But society cannot adapt so many migrants.

Being president doesn’t change who you are – it reveals who you are.

Donald Trump and I have, firstly, met more than once at various international venues and secondly, we regularly talk over the phone.

I think George W. Bush has a warm, engaging personality. But, you know, the presidency is more than just a popularity contest.

People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.

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.

Firstly, the use of our armed forces in the battlefield is a unique experience, a unique tool by which to improve our armed forces. No amount of military exercise could compare with the use of force in combat conditions.

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 strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Like most technology, the internet has mixed effects. It’s a neutral instrument.

Few people understand the magnitude of the catastrophe that happened late in the 1980s when the Communist Party had failed to modernize the Soviet Union.

China’s refusal to accept opium from Britain’s Indian colony was denounced by John Quincy Adams as a violation of the Christian principle of ‘love thy neighbor’ and ‘an enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations’.

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

When Lebanon started its resistance it was a small and divided country.