Quotes from Noam Chomsky

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom - along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.

There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I don't like the intellectual label.

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it's a well run institution - say, Goldman Sachs - it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.

U.S. Government propaganda tries to give the impression that aerial bombardment achieves near-surgical accuracy, so that military targets can be destroyed with minimal effect on civilians. Technical documents give a different picture.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.

I don't have time, you know - I want to be able to get it [information] instantly on the internet and not have to think about it. Well, there is that phenomenon as well.

The Republican Primaries were quite interesting. The establishment had its candidate, [Mitt] Romney, a kind of a Wall Street lawyer and investor, and they wanted him in. But the base didn't want him.

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

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.

Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn't have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.

As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states - no more, no less.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet's corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

Turkey must find its place if, of course, it can heal its internal sores, and none is more malignant than the perennial Kurdish issue.

In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.

By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.

I know some really outstanding Turkish journalists, and have been pleased and honored to be able to join with them a few times in their courageous protests against state terror and repression.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

The ideal is to create a completely fragmented atomized society where everybody is totally alone, doing nothing but trying to pursue created wants, and the wants are created.