Noam Chomsky

If someone was watching this from Mars, they’d collapse in ridicule. The United States is telling Iran to stop its aggressive militarism? I mean we occupy two countries on their border…

The Institute of Defense Analysis…has been working on crowd control, which means control of blacks, students, peace demonstrators. And the technology for doing this is extremely efficacious and will only improve. So that’s one reason for nonviolence.

Now the shift is toward trying to keep taxes just on wages and on consumption – which everyone has to do – not, say, on dividends, which only go to the rich. And that’s shifted the burden enormously.

I would not use the term “totalitarian” to refer to the American system of “brainwashing under freedom.” It is, nevertheless, a remarkably effective system, a fact that is rarely recognized, analyzed or understood.

The European reaction to Obama is a European delusion.

Distress is so severe that among white middle-aged Americans, mortality is actually increasing, something unheard of in functioning societies apart from war or pestilence. There are similar phenomena in Europe under the ‘business first’ (‘neoliberal’/’austerity’) assault.

Banning guns is an idea whose time has come.

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.

Don’t automatically obey Presidential directives if you disagree or if you suspect he hasn’t considered key aspects of the issue.

In my personal opinion, Russia is no less democratic than it used to be. It is a democratic country. It is democratic enough.

The presidency is more than a popularity contest.

How could this Y2K be a problem in a country where we have Intel and Microsoft?

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.

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 U.S. will not permit constructive programs in its own domains, so it must ensure that they are destroyed elsewhere to terminate ‘the threat of a good example’.

We – we need strength, we need energy, we need quickness and we need brain in this country to turn it around.

Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level – there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy.

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.

You know I vowed when I became President not to talk about the loneliest toughest job in the world and I didn’t.

The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground.

Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.