Noam Chomsky

There’s a whole filtering process that enables people to rise through the system into managerial roles only if they’ve demonstrated that they’ve successfully internalized the values demanded by private power.

The Institute of Defense Analysis…has been working on crowd control, which means control of blacks, students, peace demonstrators. And the technology for doing this is extremely efficacious and will only improve. So that’s one reason for nonviolence.

Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

This notion of being “anti-American” is quite an interesting one-it’s actually a totalitarian notion-it isn’t used in free societies…as far as I know, we are the only democratic society where the concept isn’t just ridiculed.

By now, about seventy percent of the population is literally disenfranchised. They’re the lower seventy percent on the income/wealth scale. Their political representatives simply pay no attention to them, so it doesn’t matter what they think.

In fact, I think it’s disgraceful even to keep Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy. I did visit him there once, but you can guess yourself. It’s, in many ways, worse than imprisonment.

There’s a whole filtering process that enables people to rise through the system into managerial roles only if they’ve demonstrated that they’ve successfully internalized the values demanded by private power.

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.

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

The international monetary fund recently [2014] did a study in which it concluded that virtually the entire profit of the big banks comes from the government insurance policy.

There was a recent study by the IMF which tried to estimate the subsidy that energy corporations get from governments. The total was colossal. I think it was around $5 trillion annually. That’s got nothing to do with markets and capitalism.

There is talk … of our constructing Dnieprostroy through our own means. The means needed are great, several hundred millions. Let us not get into the position of the peasant who, after accumulating a nest-egg, instead of repairing his plough and renewing his equipment, buys a gramophone and goes bankrupt.

Now if you can’t pay back a loan to me, I don’t say that your neighbors have to pay it back. But that’s what the IMF says. The IMF says the people of the country have to pay back the debt which they had nothing to do with, it was usually given to dictators, or rich elites…

We need a great president.

If the Democrats could get their act together, overcoming the schism between the donor-oriented New Democrat Party management and the increasingly activist and social democratic base, they would have a decent chance to take over Congress.

The CIA is mainly a branch of the executive to carry out secret and usually illegal activities that the executive branch wants. It wants them to be kept secret because it knows that the public won’t accept them. So it’s highly undemocratic even domestically.

I think that the centralisation of access to information through the few major corporations that by now virtually monopolise information transmission, like Facebook, Google, Amazon, is extremely dangerous.

When you’re not engaged in the day-to-day struggles that everybody feels, you slowly start losing touch. And I think it’s important for the people in the White House to have a finger on the pulse.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union is one of a number of factors that had the effect of essentially eliminating Third World voices. As long as [it] was there, two big gangsters parading around, there was some space for independent forces, there was room for non-alignment.

Don’t be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.