Noam Chomsky

The House Armed Services Committee a couple of years ago described the role of Congress as that of a sometimes querulous but essentially kindly uncle who complains while furiously puffing on his pipe but who finally, as everyone expects, gives in and hands over the allowance.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

The internet is an élite organization; most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.

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.

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

So sure, if you can find a theory that has some real principles which are of some interest and you can draw conclusions from them which you can apply to interpreting the actual world around you then sure, that’s wonderful. If there are such theories, I am happy to see them.

Don’t say “the White House wants.” Buildings can’t want.

The real surprise in the [2016] election was the Sanders campaign, which broke with a long tradition of pretty much bought elections, and was stopped only by machinations of the Obama-Clinton party managers.

The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.

Our society, including the liberals, must understand that there must be order.

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.

Defending rights against the encroachments of the government saves the common liberties of the country.

And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising principles, that lead us into revolutions?

China’s refusal to accept opium from Britain’s Indian colony was denounced by John Quincy Adams as a violation of the Christian principle of ‘love thy neighbor’ and ‘an enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations’.

A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing.

Russia will not soon become, if it ever becomes, a second copy of the United States or England – where liberal value have deep historic roots.

No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

The educational system was a highly predictable victim of the neoliberal reaction, guided by the maxim of ‘private affluence and public squalor’. Funding for public education has sharply declined. Tuition has exploded, leading to a plague of unpayable student debt.

For example, a US corporation that has an outlet in Puerto Rico may decide to take its profits in Puerto Rico, because of tax rebates. It shifts its prices around, using what’s called “transfer pricing,” so it doesn’t seem to be making a profit here.

Today, the Iraqi citizen sees that America is coming and wants to occupy his country and kill him, and he is willing to experience for himself what happened in Palestine.