Quotes from Noam Chomsky

I don't think we're smart enough to design, in any detail what a perfectly just and free society would be like. I think we can give some guidelines and more significant, we can ask how we can progress in that direction.

The appeal of the antifascist resistance required the United States and United Kingdom to move quickly, and often brutally, to dismantle the resistance and its accomplishments, particularly in northern Italy, where workers had taken over plants and the germs of a free self-governing society were beginning to flourish.

Well, a good place to start if you want to know what something was about is to look to see what changes it introduced. And particularly in the case of a war planned in advance where the outcome was never in any doubt, I think you have solid reason to believe the result was what the thing was really for in the first place.

We're in favor of independence as long as it's in other people's empires, not in our own.)

In the case of Israel-Palestine, a one-state solution will arise only on the U.S. model: with extermination or expulsion of the indigenous population.

Philosophers often appear to intend to want to get answers about humans that we can't get about insects, and that's too much, yaknow?

The United States can be held to lead the international community only if that community is defined as the United States and whoever happens to go along with it, often through intimidation, as is sometimes tacitly conceded. Critics

Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time—it refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit.

And when you look, most of the time these authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else—they're just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top. So

It's quite standard for those who hold the clubs to say: Forget about everything that happened and let's just go on from here. In other words, I've got what I want, and out forget about what your concerns are. I'll just take what I want.

If we are biological organisms, not angels, then our cognitive faculties are similar to those called "physical capacities" and should be studied much as other systems of the body are.

If it is plausible that ideology will in general serve as a mask for self-interest, then it is a natural presumption that intellectuals, in interpreting history or formulating policy, will tend to adopt an elitist position, condemning popular movements and mass participation in decision making, and emphasizing rather the necessity for supervision by those who possess the knowledge and understanding that is required (so they claim) to manage society and control social change.

The health care system in the United States, I'm sure you know, is a total international scandal. It's twice the per capita cost of comparable countries and one of the worst outcomes, with a huge number of people uninsured altogether. And it's going to get worse.

The powerful are self-immunized from even inquiry, let alone punishment for their crimes.

W]e have a democracy that uses free elections to put in place known obstructionists, and a media that disproportionately gives a forum to economically driven ideology over sound science.

Governments are bigger than ever, but under neoliberalism they have far less pretense to being concerned with addressing non-corporate interests. And

in a predatory capitalist economy, state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence and to prevent the destruction of the physical environment [...].

Aristotle was right—the way to overcome the paradox of democracy is by reducing inequality, not reducing democracy.

Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift.

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another.

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

This impulse, never condemned or rebuked by a world that watched by and did nothing, led to the massive expulsion of 750,000 people (half of the region's population), the destruction of more than five hundred villages, and the demolition of a dozen towns in 1948.

Il existe deux ensembles de principes. Les principes de pouvoir et de privilège et les principes de vérité et de justice. Si vous courez après le pouvoir et les privilèges, ce sera toujours au détriment de la vérité et de la justice.

Amnesty International, which was opening its yearlong campaign to protect human rights defenders in Colombia in response to the country's horrifying record of attacks against human rights and labor activists and mostly the usual victims of state terror: the poor and defenseless.