Noam Chomsky

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster’; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.

But you really have to think through the talk about nonviolence. Sure, everybody’s in favor of nonviolence rather than violence, but under what conditions and when? Is it an absolute principle?

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.

The point [of the PR industry] is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information-and similarly, to undermine democracy by the same method.

A fundamental goal of U.S. policy towards Latin America (and elsewhere), long-standing and well-documented, is to take control of the police and military so as to assure that the population will not act upon unacceptable ideas.

Since the white working class cannot be mobilized to support the class enemy on the basis of their actual programs, the ‘radical insurgency’ called ‘the Republican Party’ appeals to its constituency on what are called ‘social-cultural issues’: religion, fear, racism, nationalism.

The GI bill provided free education to huge numbers of people – white men overwhelmingly – who would probably never have gone to college, a great benefit to them personally and to the whole society.

In accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the issues of foreign policy and defense are fully in the hands of the president.

At least in Russia, you cannot just go and tap into someone’s phone conversation without a warrant issued by court. That’s more or less the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.

As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized …

If one looks at the map of the world, it’s difficult to find Iraq, and one would think it rather easy to subdue such a small country.

…corporations are fundamentally illegitimate, …they don’t have to exist at all in their modern form. Just as other oppressive institutions – slavery, say, or royalty – have been changed or eliminated, so corporate power can be changed of eliminated.

It’s better to be hanged for loyalty than be rewarded for betrayal.

More time and at least a degree of reasonableness in the treatment of the Labour Party. Because the message that we’re putting out on austerity hasn’t fundamentally changed. There’s been an enormous barrier in getting it across, but now I think a lot of people understand what we’re saying and why we’re saying it.

As far as we are concerned, we Syria have not changed.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

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

China has created very good investment tools, including an entire network of very large funds. The Russian Private Investment Fund works with some of those funds, with China’s largest investment funds.

A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.

An educational system should cultivate from kindergarten to graduate school, and in the best cases sometimes does, and that leads to people who are, at least by my standards, well educated.?

With complex integrated supply chains, subcontracting and other such devices, corporate ownership of the world’s wealth is becoming a more realistic measure of global power than national wealth…