Noam Chomsky

Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don’t just succumb.

A business or a big corporation is a fascist structure internally. Power is at the top. Orders go from top to bottom. You either follow the orders or get out.

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.

Freedom without opportunity is a devil’s gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal.

Usually, by and large, the U.S. foreign policy, like other major states, is driven by the dominant domestic forces. That’s kind of natural. And the dominant domestic forces are, of course, the corporate sector. That’s not in question.

The idea of neutral objectivity is at best misleading and often fraudulent. We cannot help but approach complex and controversial questions – especially those of human significance – with a definite point of view, with an ax to grind if you like…

If a prospective Presidential approach can’t be explained clearly enough to be understood well, it probably hasn’t been thought through well enough. If not well understood by the American people, it probably won’t “sail” anyway. Send it back for further thought.

Earlier in the twentieth century some critics called fascism capitalism with the gloves off, meaning that fascism was pure capitalism without democratic rights and organizations.

Throughout the two leadership campaigns I read quite a lot of Oscar Wilde.

Scholars per se do not have deeper political insights than other persons and are not morally superior to others. But they are obligated to help politicians seek and find the truth.

In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.

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

..people would like to think there’s somebody up there who knows what he’s doing. Since we don’t participate, we don’t control and we don’t even think about the questions of crucial importance, we hope somebody is paying attention who has some competence. Let’s hope the ship has a captain, in other words, since we’re not taking in deciding what’s going on. I think that’s a factor. But also, it is an important feature of the ideological system to impose on people the feeling that they are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues; they’d better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are often media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and control international affairs.

The European reaction to Obama is a European delusion.

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

At a certain point, we saw the police cracking down on the Occupy Wall Street activists. I won’t call the actions of police appropriate or inappropriate.

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton?

Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.

I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal.

Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.