Noam Chomsky

Both prisons and inner-city schools target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because we’re a civilized people, we put them in prison, rather than sending death squads out to murder them.

The U.S….will continue to defend U.S.-based corporate and financial interests while seeking to maintain a global environment in which they can flourish. That requires, in particular, that the Third World be kept in its service role.

Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, the earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in the same terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren’t human. They weren’t like us. We had to crush and destroy them.

Business power is very far from benign and it’s completely unaccountable. It’s a totalitarian system that has an enormous effect on our lives. It’s also the main reason why the government isn’t benign.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

For the Leninist, the masses must be strictly disciplined, while the socialist will struggle to achieve a social order in which discipline “will become superfluous” as the freely associated producers “work for their own accord” (Marx).

?The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.

…corporations are fundamentally illegitimate, …they don’t have to exist at all in their modern form. Just as other oppressive institutions – slavery, say, or royalty – have been changed or eliminated, so corporate power can be changed of eliminated.

The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.

We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism.

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.

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.

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.

Bolivia is a striking example. The mostly white, Europeanized elite, which is a minority, happens to be sitting on most of the hydrocarbon reserves. For the first time Bolivia is becoming democratic. So it’s therefore bitterly hated by the West, which despises democracy, because it’s much too dangerous.

I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it’s literally going to cease to exist.

We need to be very careful. Democracy is the issue, and democracy ought to be the means by which we decide these issues, rather than secret negotiations resulting in a fait accompli being presented to us.

The argument for liberty is…an argument…against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.

Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.

I would like to stress here that a lasting peace in the Chechen republic and so-called peace talks with the bandits are not the same thing, and I would ask everyone to make no mistake about that.

I think God has some mechanism that he uses to punish those that make mistakes.

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.