Noam Chomsky

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

It is quite possible-overwhelmingly probable, one might guess-that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, ‘We’re sorry we did it,’ that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it’s just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, ‘We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.’ Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.

The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.

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.

At the deepest level, the media contribute to the sense that the government is the enemy, and they suppress the sources of real power in the society, which lie in the totalitarian institutions-the corporations, now international in scale -that control the economy and much of our social life.

The only way a kid is going to practise is if it’s total fun for him… and it was for me.

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

You only require two things in life: your sanity and your wife.

My response to the end of Soviet tyranny was similar to my reaction to the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini. In all cases, it is a victory for the human spirit. It should have been particularly welcome to socialists, since a great enemy of socialism had at last collapsed.

Be precise. A lack of precision is dangerous when the margin of error is small.

Export in technical equipment is growing, which shows that some structural changes are going on in the economy. Export of agricultural produce, at 20 billion last year, was higher than defense exports, which were at 15 billion.

I think the American people should express their preferences, and we’ll accept their choice.

Take the firearms first, and then go to court. A lot of times by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court to get the due process procedures, I like taking the guns early … Take the gun first, go through due process second.

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

When our interests matched, the Americans have been good to us, and when the interests differed, they wanted us to mold ourselves to them, which we refused.

I would prefer to think of anarchism as the libertarian left, and from that point of view anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist [Bakunin, Kropotkin and others.]

Indeed, Russia and the U.S. were allies during the two tragic conflicts of the Second and the First World Wars, which allows us to think there’s something objectively bringing us together in difficult times, and I think – I believe – it has to do with geopolitical interests and also has a moral component.

Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’.