Noam Chomsky

But Klaus Barbie was basically small potatoes. Operation Paper Clip was a big operation, involving many top Nazis. We managed to get Walter Rauff, the guy who created the gas chambers, off to Chile. Others went to fascist Spain.

The GI bill provided free education to huge numbers of people – white men overwhelmingly – who would probably never have gone to college, a great benefit to them personally and to the whole society.

The U.S. government played a significant role [in the 1965 Indonesian genocide] by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which hunted down the leftists and killed them, former U.S. diplomats say…

So the growth of corporate propaganda in the United States more or less parallels the growth of democracy, for quite straightforward reasons. It’s not any kind of secret. It is discussed very frankly and openly in business literature and academic social-science journals.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the enlightenment.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

When…the people are invested with the supreme authority…they discover a multitude of wants… to satisfy these exigencies recourse must be had to the coffers of the state.

It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of the revolution’ than to write about it.

That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything.

It’s important to remember that the constitutional system was not designed in the first place to defend the rights of people. Rather, the rights of people had to be balanced, as Madison put it, against what he called ‘the rights of property.’

Imperialism: The final stage of Capitalism.

The Russian parliament has condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did.

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

The internet provides access to an extraordinary range of information, opinion, and interpretation. But as with any source, it is useful to the extent that it is used with discrimination and insight.

It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody’s permission or to obey anybody’s orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today.

True friends of liberty… ought constantly to be on the alert to prevent the power of government from lightly sacrificing the private rights of individuals to the general execution of its designs. At such times no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed; no private rights are so unimportant that they can be surrendered with impunity to the caprices of a government… [because] men accustom themselves to sacrifice private interest without scruple and to trample on the rights of individuals in order more speedily to accomplish any public purpose.

[on Les Paul guitars] It’s the construction and sound of it. With this material, the wood and neck construction and scale length really yields a different sound all together, and I just gravitate towards that. I pretty much get everything I want with it, so I’m very satisfied.

It’s a time for the unconventional. I’m not a traditional thinker. I’m a non-conformist. So [Trump’s victory] relates to the non-conformist part of me.

When the interests of the privileged and powerful are the guiding commitment of both political factions, people who do not share these interests tend to stay home.

Well, I do think there’s blame — yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. You look at — you look at both sides. I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either.