Noam Chomsky

Many countries are so weak that they can’t really solve their internal problems in the face of US power; they can’t even control their own wealthy. Their rich have virtually no social obligations-they don’t pay taxes and don’t keep their money in the country.

Major terrorists are provided refuge in Florida. The late Bosch is one, Orlando Bosch. Posada is another. You remember there was something called the Bush Doctrine, Bush II: A country that harbors terrorists is the same as the terrorists themselves.

Capital punishment is a crime. I agree with Amnesty International on that one, and indeed with most of the world. The state should have no right to take people’s lives.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination’, we might say – exercised through the mass media.

A very small proportion of declassified documents have anything to do with security, no matter how broadly you interpret it. They primarily have to do with ensuring that the major enemy, namely, the domestic population, does not find out what power systems are doing.

It is beyond imagining in responsible circles that we might have some culpability for mass slaughter and destruction, or owe some debt to the millions of maimed and orphaned, or to the peasants who still die from exploding ordnance left from the U.S. assault…

The Drug War is an effort to stimulate fear of dangerous people from who we have to protect ourselves. It is also, a direct form of control of what are called “dangerous classes,” those superfluous people who don’t really have a function contributing to profit-making and wealth.

There is a limit to the application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens.

Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best things to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we’re doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change.

Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children[‘s] … normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don’t understand.

A man’s eyes should be torn out if he can only see the past

Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, the earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in the same terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren’t human. They weren’t like us. We had to crush and destroy them.

I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it’s literally going to cease to exist.

We are a nation of communities… a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.

You can build a throne of bayonets, but you can’t sit on it for long.

Like most technology, the internet has mixed effects. It’s a neutral instrument.

Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialised.

No matter how you cut it, this real debate on personal accounts is about the legitimacy of Social Security; it’s not about the solvency of Social Security.

Nothing will bring American sympathy along with us so much as American blood shed in the field.

To forgive the terrorists is up to God, but to send them to him is up to me.

My first four jobs were minimum wage or close to it.