Noam Chomsky

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

…the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

The House Armed Services Committee a couple of years ago described the role of Congress as that of a sometimes querulous but essentially kindly uncle who complains while furiously puffing on his pipe but who finally, as everyone expects, gives in and hands over the allowance.

It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.

Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.

A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that’s more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity…and therefore I think that it’s, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.

Defending rights against the encroachments of the government saves the common liberties of the country.

I don’t read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland.

When you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.

While maintaining our nuclear potential at the proper level, we need to devote more attention to developing the entire range of means of information warfare.

At the time of the First World War there was a fringe of dissidents, Bertrand Russell for example, who were in jail; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknicht, in jail; Eugene Debs, in jail. That’s the standard picture throughout history. We find it right now.

Right before the 2000 [U.S.] elections, about 75 percent regarded it as virtually meaningless, some game involving rich contributors, party managers, and candidates who are trained to project images that conceal issues, but might pick up some votes.

Public officials are all right if they stay in their proper sphere and perform their proper functions but when they get greedy for wider scope and more power and money they lose their value and become parasites.

So sure, if you can find a theory that has some real principles which are of some interest and you can draw conclusions from them which you can apply to interpreting the actual world around you then sure, that’s wonderful. If there are such theories, I am happy to see them.

I would question the use of something as simplistic as IQ to come to any conclusions regarding human affairs.

Hizbullah is not a militia.

When the Americans could no longer protect Barbie, they moved him over to the Vatican-run ‘ratline’, where Croatian Nazi priests and others managed to spirit him off to Latin America. There he continued his career as a big drug lord and narco-trafflcker.

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.

It is even more so when it comes to Iraq, which is a large Arab country with scientific, material, and human resources and is able to accomplish, at the least, what Lebanon accomplished, and more.

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

The Presbyterian Church took a very strong stand on a boycott on the divestment – there are no sanctions…they did it the way it’s effective. They concentrated on the occupied territories and on U.S. multinationals participating in the occupied territories.