Noam Chomsky

The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.

Not only were [the British] able to break into China for the first time, but also the profits from opium supported the Raj, the costs of the British Navy, and provided very significant capital which fueled the industrial revolution in England.

To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to ‘moral equivalence,’ or ‘political correctness,’ or ‘the error of of atheism,’ or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.

In fact, the belief that neurophysiology is even relevant to the functioning of the mind is just hypothesis. Who knows if we’re looking at the right aspects of the brain at all. Maybe there are other aspects of the brain that nobody has even dreamt of looking at yet. That’s often happened in the history of science. When people say that the mental is the neurophysiological at a higher level, they’re being radically unscientific. We know a lot about the mental from a scientific point of view. We have explanatory theories that account for a lot of things. The belief that neurophysiology is implicated in these things could be true, but we have every little evidence for it. So, it’s just a kind of hope; look around and you see neurons; maybe they’re implicated.

The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.

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.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise human science is at a loss.

I don’t mind what Congress does, as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.

Israel ranks her priorities in the following way: security, land, and water.

Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.

The Eurasian union is a project meant to preserve the identities of nations and the historic Eurasian community in the new century, in a new world.

I’m using the term “First Spouse” instead of First Lady because I believe we will have a woman president.

The worst thing for a politician is to try and cling to power by every possible means, and focus only on that.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

American Communists have the opportunity to preach freely their ideas. It would be absolutely wrong to hold the Soviet government responsible for activities of the American Communists.

From being a patriotic myth, the Russian people have become an awful reality.

I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

The idea that workers are only interested in horse-racing [odds] is an absurdity that cannot withstand even a superficial look at labour history or the lively and independent working class press that flourished in many places, including the manufacturing towns of New England…

If you want to preserve – I’m very serious now – if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.

What is going on right now, it is unacceptable, it is wrong. However, it must be admitted that it is the result of inaccurate regulation, that was brought in recently in the sphere of energy, in energy resources.