Noam Chomsky

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.

What is called ‘capitalism’ is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close co-operation with powerful states…

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you’re saying, because it’s too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you’ve resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, ‘You’re an asshole,’ which maybe he or she is, and if you don’t say, ‘That’s idiotic,’ when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.

The Creel [propaganda] Commission…succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist [U.S.] population into a hysterical, war-mongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.

The only way we could get what most of the population wants with regard to health care is either by a large-scale popular movement, which would mean moving towards democracy and nobody in power is going to want that, or else if the business community decides that it’s good for them.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

The whole world recognizes Russia’s cultural achievements. It is impossible to imagine the world culture without Russian culture, without our music and literature.

Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.

I seemed to be in a minority on every subject. Every argument that came up, every debate that came up, I was in a minority of one usually, sometimes two. That was quite character forming.

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.

We will not allow the past to drag us down and stop us from moving ahead. We understand where we should move.

America will start winning again, winning like never before.

They think because they have put my husband on an island that he will be forgotten. They are wrong. The harder they try to silence him, the louder I will become!

You’re having a lot of fun, right? Suppose Hillary got elected instead of Trump, you think it would be so exciting?

Every day, you have the power to choose our better history – by opening your hearts and minds, by speaking up for what you know is right.

When the victims are classified as less than human … Communists, terrorists, or whatever may be the contemporary term of art – their extermination raises no moral qualms. And the agents of extermination are praiseworthy moderates-our Nazis …

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that in Russia, unlike in one third of the world’s countries, being gay is not a crime.

The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjuration of force in the settlement of disputes between states; the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; the safeguarding of international peace and security.

Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile. This is a party of government, and I will lead it as a party of government.

Of course there are differences, but they are not fundamental. Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars – they would think the country has gone insane.