Quotes from Noam Chomsky

The idea that we must choose between the method of winning hearts and minds and the method of shaping behavior presumes that we have the right to choose at all. This is to grant us a right that we would surely accord to no other power. Yet the overwhelming body of American scholarship accords us this right.

the way they put it, we as a society have decided not to modify the society but to modify the children.

Not all evils can be rectified, but ongoing evils surely should stop.

They declare that it is unpatriotic and disruptive to question the workings of authority--but patriotic to institute harsh and regressive policies that benefit the wealthy, undermine social programs that serve the needs of the great majority, and subordinate a frightened population to increased state control.

That is neoliberal democracy in a nutshell: trivial debate over minor issues by parties that basically pursue the same pro-business policies regardless of formal differences and campaign debate. Democracy is permissible as long as the control of business is off-limits to popular deliberation or change; i.e. so long as it isn't democracy.

Well, I think that what used to be called, centuries ago, wage slavery is intolerable. And I don't think people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive. I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically, by their participants, by the communities in which they exist, and so on; and I think basically through various kinds of free association.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

The public must be reduced to passivity in the political realm, but for submissiveness to become a reliable trait, it must be entrenched in the realm of belief as well.

It's easy to think of things that need to be done, but they all have a prerequisite, namely, a mass popular base that is committed to implementing it.

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.

It's not the generals, it's the civilians who authorise and organise the worst war crimes.

Willingness to be puzzled by what seem to be obvious truths is the first step towards gaining understanding of how the world works.

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors [...] I don't usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this 'hopey changey' stuff, she was right, there was nothing there. And it was understood by the people who run the political system, and so it's no great secret that the US electoral system is mainly a public relations extravaganza...it's sort of a marketing affair.

I mean, you can pretend up to a certain point that the world has infinite resources and that it's an infinite wastebasket-but at some point you're going to run into the reality, which is that that isn't true.

It's intellectual freedom when a journalist can understand that 2 + 2 = 4; that's what Orwell was writing about in 1984. Everybody here applauds that book, but nobody is willing to think about what it means. What Winston Smith [the main character] was saying is, if we can still understand that 2 + 2 = 4, they haven't taken everything away. Okay? Well, in the United States, people can't even understand that 2 + 2 = 4.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long. There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly. This hypothetical Martian would probably conclude that human beings were an evolutionary error.

So we know that human nature, and that includes our nature, yours and mine, can very easily turn people into quite efficient torturers and mass-murderers and slave-drivers...To the extent that the statement is true, and there is such an extent, it's just not relevant: human nature also has the capacity to lead to selflessness, and cooperation, and sacrifice, and support, and solidarity, and tremendous courage, and lots of other things too.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to sell themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract - but that's a joke. If your choice is, do what I tell you or starve, that's not a choice - it's infact what was commonly referred to as 'wage slavery' in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

So we march on, following our leaders, toward an "Armageddon of our own making.

There's no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.

There is no demonstration against Zionism, because even the European Parliament regards such a demonstration as anti-Semitic.

Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions

Obama's global drone assassination campaign, a remarkable innovation in global terrorism, exhibits the same patterns. By most accounts, it is generating terrorists more rapidly than it is murdering those suspected of someday intending to harm us—an impressive contribution by a constitutional lawyer on the eight hundredth anniversary of Magna Carta, which established the basis for the principle of presumption of innocence that is the foundation of civilized law.

Israelis like to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an "enlightened" or "benign" occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen. The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel's was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation.