Noam Chomsky

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.

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.

Israel and its US backers would no doubt prefer for the Palestinian leadership to be immobilized in endless negotiations, while the concrete work of colonization proceeds – the traditional Zionist practice for a century.

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.

Some of the slave-owners, like Jefferson, appreciated the moral turpitude on which the economy relied. But he feared the liberation of slaves, who have ‘ten thousand recollections’ of the crimes to which they were subjected.

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

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

Homelessness in the UK is wholly unnescessary.

When the Greek government suggested asking the people of Greece to express their opinions on their fate, the reaction of European elites was utter horror at the impudence. How can Greeks dare to regard democracy as a value to be respected in the country of its origin?

As a musician, African American, guy out in Hollywood, all these different things, you know, everyone around me tried to pick my candidate for me, and then told me every time I said I liked Trump that I couldn’t say it out loud or my career would be over, or I’d get kicked out of the black community – because blacks, we’re supposed to have a monolithic thought, we can only be Democrats.

When our interests matched, the Americans have been good to us, and when the interests differed, they wanted us to mold ourselves to them, which we refused.

I always touch people, because I know that there’s a level of anxiety, people are teary or they’re nervous, and I just try to physically hold them and bring them down and say: ‘We’re here. I’m just Michelle.’

[on Jeremy Cobyn] It is a different type of Labour Party. Can it be taken back? I don’t know

With regards to the infrastructure, these 11 stadiums. Of course, we spent a lot of money on this and it is imperative that all of this infrastructure, I completely agree, it must work and above all work toward the development of sport on a large scale.

Please don’t ask me to do that which I’ve just said I’m not going to do, because you’re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.

I’m eternally grateful to fate and the citizens of Russia that they’ve trusted me to be the head of the Russian government.

Overall, we are moving in the right direction. We have started on the trajectory toward robust economic growth in Russia. Yes, this growth is humble, small, but it is also not a fall. Growth was at 1.5 percent last year.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

Real liberty exists only there where exploitation has been annihilated, where no oppression of some peoples by others exists, where there is no unemployment and pauperism, where a person does not tremble because tomorrow he may lose his job, home and bread.

Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was ‘the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’

French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the ‘star’ system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another – Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida – some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage.