Quotes from Noam Chomsky

My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.

It seems self-evident that we should want people to be free, to be able to play an active part in making decisions about matters of concern to them, to the largest possible extent.

Plainly elites in America don't want democracy. And why should they? Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.

Should a community... be free to enact legislation to say they don't want blacks? Now that's illegal. Fifty years ago it was legal. Is that progress or is that regress?

You ought to teach kids that elections take place but that's not politics. If you want to know how legislation is made it doesn't come from elections.

You know, you can go to the fiftieth thing on a Google list and that's the one you want, but the ones you are going to be directed to are the funders.

We have to be irrational and vindictive, because that's going to frighten people. And we have to maintain this for years. And then we'll be able to carry out the actions that we want to carry out.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.

It is not a war. It is murder.

Pre-emptive war might fall within the framework of international law.

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

Internal security means something. It means war against your own population.

It's very common for the victims to understand a system better than the people who are holding the stick.

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

The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.

I don't see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that's almost inconceivable.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

France had a policy, initiated by General de Gaulle, of trying to turn Europe into what was then called a 'third force,' independent of the two superpowers, so Europe should pursue an independent course.

In 1979, Iranians carried out an illegitimate act: They overthrew a tyrant that the United States had imposed and supported, and moved on an independent path, not following U.S. orders.

Israel is following policies which maximise its security threats... policies which choose expansion over security... policies which lead to their moral degradation, their isolation, their delegitimation, as they call it now, and very likely ultimate destruction. That's not impossible.

I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven - that's none of my business, ultimately. I won't lecture her on the philosophy of science.

For a while, after the Second World War, when there was strong support for labor, this was done subtly.