Quotes from Noam Chomsky

It is easy to be carried away by the sheer horror of what the daily press reveals and to lose sight of the fact that this is merely the brutal exterior of a deeper crime, of commitment to a social order that guarantees endless suffering and humiliation and denial of elementary human rights

No doubt a propaganda system is more effective when its doctrines are insinuated rather than asserted, when it sets the bounds for possible thought rather than simply imposing a clear and easily identifiable doctrine that one must parrot—or suffer the consequences.

In a capitalist society the mass media are capitalist institutions. The fact that these institutions reflect the ideology of dominant economic interests is hardly surprising.

The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill civilians, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their

In this case, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's orders were being carried out—"anything that flies on anything that moves," an open call for genocide that is rare in the historical record.

With a little industry and application, anyone who is willing to extricate himself from the system of shared ideology and propaganda will readily see through the modes of distortion developed by substantial segments of the intelligentsia. Everybody is capable of doing that. If such analysis is often carried out poorly, that is because, quite commonly, social and political analysis is produced to defend special interests rather than to account for the actual events.

There is tons of work to be done, and lots of people who would like to do the work. It's just that the economic system is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can't even put together idle hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and which would be beneficial to all of us. That's just the mark of a failed system. The most dramatic mark of it.

the radical pacifist message of the Gospels [was] largely abandoned when the Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, adopted Christianity as the official doctrine of the Roman empire — turning the church of the persecuted into the church of the persecutors, as historian of Christianity Hans Küng described the transformation.

teaching should not be compared to filling a bottle with water but rather to helping a flower to grow in its own way.

Those who are advantaged by the status quo are continually at work to make us understand that the way things are is the way things should be. And thus, the ways in which we understand the world are very much connected to the ways in which we interact with the world.

In reality, a few years later a North–South compact permitted the slaveholding states to reinstitute a form of slavery by effectively criminalizing black life, providing a cheap and disciplined labor force for much of the industrial revolution, a system that persisted until World War II created the need for free labor. The ugly history is being reenacted under the vicious "drug war" of the past generation, since Ronald Reagan.

Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, which was efficient but also a highly controlling device. There was a problem with the assembly line. It's so onerous that people dropped out. They couldn't stand it. They had to hire almost a thousand workers to see if they could get one hundred to stay on.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent 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 in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

It is useful to remember that no matter where we turn, there is rarely any shortage of elevated ideals to accompany the resort to violence.

The choice is ours, the choice is yours.

Parler des affaires du monde est une chose banale. Il faut travailler un peu, lire un peu, réfléchir - rien de très profond. L'idée que cela nécessite des qualifications spéciales n'est qu'une escroquerie de plus.

There are any number of questions that might lead one to undertake a study of language. Personally, I am primarily intrigued by the possibility of learning something, from the study of language, that will bring to light inherent properties of the human mind.

Of the approximately nine hundred thousand Palestinians living in the territories designated by the UN as a Jewish state, only one hundred thousand remained on or near their lands and homes. Those who remained became the Palestinian minority in Israel. The rest were expelled, or fled under the threat of expulsion, and a few thousand died in massacres.

The basic function of the FBI is not to stop crime. Rather, it functions as a political police, in large measure.

there is a crucial difference between a one-state solution and a binational state. In general, nation-states have been imposed with substantial violence and repression for one reason—because they seek to force varied and complex populations into a single mold.

Though they have been subjected to disgraceful treatment, the Palestinians in East Jerusalem are fortunate in comparison with those who are less visible, and therefore can be killed, tortured, humiliated, and driven from their destroyed homes and lands virtually at will. It is, in fact, astonishing that their spirit has not been broken.

People want to explore, we want to press our capacities to their limits, we want to appreciate what we can. But the joy of creation is something very few people get the opportunity to have in our society: artists get to have it, craftspeople have it, scientists.

The phrase itself, the American dream, was coined in the '30s basically in the heart of the Depression. Much of this framing was pointed at the need to keep the economy rumbling at a great pace when World War II ended. So one of the ways in which industry could keep going was to promulgate not collective consumption, but individual consumption.

Classical liberalism was wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, but