Noam Chomsky

The Leninist antagonism to the most essential features of socialism was evident from the very start. Lenin and Trotsky, upon assuming power, immediately devoted themselves to destroying the liberatory potential of Soviets and factory committees.

An educational system should cultivate from kindergarten to graduate school, and in the best cases sometimes does, and that leads to people who are, at least by my standards, well educated.?

[on Trump] But there are some pretty stable elements of his ideology, if you can even grant him that concept. One of them is: “Climate change is not taking place.” As he puts it: “Forget it.” And that’s almost a death knell for the species – not tomorrow, but the decisions we take now are going to affect things in a couple of decades, and in a couple of generations it could be catastrophic.

This administration is extremely unpredictable. Trump probably has no idea what he’s going to do five minutes from now, so you can’t-literally-make predictions with much confidence.

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

If you go back far enough, [socialism] meant basically control of production by producers, elimination of wage labor, democratization of all spheres of life; production, commerce, education, media, workers’ control in factories, community control of communities, and so on.

Nation-state systems basically arose in Europe in their modern sense, and they’re extremely unnatural social organizations. They had to be imposed on the populations by violence, extreme violence.

The Ethiopian government’s use of the railway from Djibouti to Addis Ababa was, in practice, a hazardous regards transport of arms intended for the Ethiopian forces.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

A total of 1,580 people, the civilian population, suffered as a result of the bloody wave of terrorist acts that swept over Moscow and other towns and villages of our country.

If people can just pour into the country illegally, you don’t have a country.

One who views Latin America today [1981] might well assume that Hitler had won the war, though in fact it is American liberalism that a bears a major responsibility for the plague of terror and torture regimes that often mimic the Nazis.

Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.

I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success.

But you really have to think through the talk about nonviolence. Sure, everybody’s in favor of nonviolence rather than violence, but under what conditions and when? Is it an absolute principle?

What is a Rechtsstaat? It is obedience to the existing law.

We should be adult and grown up and decriminalise cannabis

I’ve been in the Labour Party all my life. I am a socialist. I am determined to see a fairer and more equal society.

Any people has a right to self-determination, and now in Europe the process of diluting national sovereignty in the framework of a united Europe is more accepted.

We [U.S.S.R. and U.S.A.] can exist peacefully together if we don’t indulge in too much mutual fault-finding in all kinds of trifles.

I understand that it’s hard for everyone, but one cannot give in to emotions… we’ll have to draw lessons from the current crisis and now we’ll have to work on overcoming it.