Quotes from Noam Chomsky

From Ferguson to Athens, via Mexico, it is clear that many governments are reproducing the tools that Israel uses to repress and oppress the Palestinians. The replication of those same tactics, methods, and often weapons serves as proof that the Palestinians are now used as guinea pigs for experimentation.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome." ? Noam Chomsky

On almost all issues, citizens could not identify the stands of the candidates--as intended.

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based mandarin class, remain in power no matter whom you elect.

El poder es siempre ilegítimo, hasta que demuestre lo contrario.

Neoliberalism works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but when the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaningful participation in decision making.

So you have to  ask, "Is it better to help the worse candidate to be elected?" You can make a case for doing that. In fact, there was an old Communist Party principle back in the  early 1930s: "the worse, the better." If you get the worse candidate in, it's going to be better, because then there will be more support for a revolution.

In the U.S. Constitution there was a category of creatures called three-fifth humans—the enslaved population. They weren't considered persons. And in fact women were barely considered persons, so they didn't have rights.

The people who are known are riding the crest of some wave. Now, you can ride the crest of the wave and try to use it to get power, which is the standard thing, or you can ride the crest of the wave because you're helping people that way, which is another thing. But the point is, it's the wave that matters

If American opinion has been uninformed, misinformed and prejudiced, the missionaries are largely to blame. Interpreting history in terms of the advance of Christianity, they have given an inadequate, distorted, and occasionally a grotesque picture of Moslems and Islam.

Candor is entirely in order: only the most devilish anti-American, after all, could question our right to act as suits our fancy. If, say, we choose to invade some defenseless country to capture one of our agents who no longer follows orders, and then try him for crimes committed while on our payroll, who could question the majesty of our system of justice? True, the UN did, but our veto took care of that childish tantrum.

Aggression is "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Tenemos dos opciones. Podemos ser pesimistas, abandonar y contribuir a que ocurra lo peor sin vuelta atrás. O ser optimistas, atrapar las oportunidades que sin duda existen y contribuir, tal vez, a que el mundo sea un lugar mejor. No es una elección demasiado difícil.

Chomsky's description of the neoliberal/corporate hold over our economy, polity, journalism, and culture is so powerful and overwhelming that for some readers it can produce a sense of resignation. In our demoralized political times, a few may go a step further and conclude that we are enmeshed in this regressive system because, alas, humanity is simply incapable of creating a more humane, egalitarian, and democratic social order.

So someone can ask me what reflects my interpretation of the way things are, and I can tell them where they can get material that looks at the world the way I think it ought to be looked at-but then they have to decide whether or not that's accurate. Ultimately it's your own mind that has to be the arbiter: you've got to rely on your own common sense and intelligence, you can't rely on anyone else for the truth.

in every modern economy, the taxpayers are made to subsidize the private corporations, who then keep the profits for themselves.

Education doesn't determine how you earn, education determines how you spend.

Scientists seeking extraterrestrial intelligence have been struck by the Fermi paradox: Where are they? Astrophysics suggests that there should be intelligent life elsewhere. Maybe they are right; there really is intelligent life, and when it discovers the strange inhabitants of Planet Earth, it has the sense to stay far away.

For the majority, real incomes have pretty much stagnated, sometimes declined. Benefits have also declined and work hours have gone up, and so on. It's not Third World misery, but it's not what it ought to be in a rich society, the richest in the world, in fact, with plenty of wealth around, which people can see, just not in their pockets.

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope.

If a man acts in a purely mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is."14

she has a blank sheet to write upon.

See, one of the serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of the whole system of indoctrination, is the idea that the government is the power?and the government's not the power, the government is one segment of power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the state-managers are usually just servants.

Yes, it's simple, really. If you're riding a bicycle and you don't want to fall off, you have to keep going - fast.