Quotes from Noam Chomsky

Es «antiliberal y amoral» el formar a los niños para que trabajen «sin apelar a la libertad ni a la inteligencia, sino en nombre del salario».

I think, very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively, independently, without external controls.

La escuela impide la difusión de verdades esenciales.

Il continuo bombardamento di materiale selezionato ad hoc, praticamente privo di voci critiche o di passaggi analitici, instilla solidamente nei lettori i presupposti che ne stanno alla base, allineando la percezione del pubblico alla giusta dottrina più efficacemente di quanto potrebbe fare un ministero della Verità. Nel frattempo i media possono sostenere che stanno solo facendo il loro mestiere onestamente: il che è vero, anche se non proprio nel senso che intendono loro.

The interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Todo esto, y mucho más, puede ocurrir mientras prevalezca la doctrina Muasher. Mientras la población general permanezca pasiva, apática y desviada hacia el consumismo o el odio a los vulnerables, los poderosos pueden hacer lo que les plazca; y los que sobrevivan podrán contemplar el resultado.

The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted.

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

This broad tendency in human development seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, authority and domination that constrain human development, and then subject them to a very reasonable challenge: Justify yourself. If these structures can't meet that challenge, they should be dismantled—and, anarchists believe, "refashioned from below," as commentator Nathan Schneider observes. In

Oggi come ieri, non c'è motivo di pensare che siamo governati da leggi misteriose e sconosciute, anziché da semplici decisioni prese all'interno di istituzioni che sono soggette alla volontà umana, istituzioni umane, che devono dimostrare la propria legittimità e se non superano l'esame possono essere sostituite da altre più libere e più giuste, com'è accaduto spesso in passato.

The new stage of capitalism recognizes that serving the genuine needs of people can be less lucrative than selling predictions of their behavior.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to run tonsils in order to survive. Now, you can say, they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract - but that's a joke. If you are choice is, do what I tell you are 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 nineenth centuries.

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.

An essential mechanism of censorship, in Orwell's view, is a good education. If you've gone to the best schools, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say, or, we may add, even to think. It all becomes part of your being. And if you're a good student and have properly absorbed the lessons, you can become a responsible intellectual. That's the unpublished preface to Animal Farm.

Opposition to idealization is simply objection to rationality; it amounts to nothing more than an insistence that we shall not have meaningful intellectual work.

every form of authority and domination and hierarchy, every authoritarian structure, has to prove that it's justified—it has no prior justification

By now, they rank people by income level or wages roughly the same: The bottom seventy per cent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.

There are other cases of this kind. For example, in San Diego the FBI apparently financed, armed, and controlled an extreme right-wing group of former Minute Men, transforming it into something called the Secret Army Organization specializing in terrorist acts of various kinds.

In my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to dismantle them in a much more free society.

In other words, first we rob and then destroy them, and then when they ask for a little bit of help, we kick them in the face. The technical term for this is Western civilization.

Consciousness is some kind of peripheral thing which picks up some of what's going on in our head.

At their most eloquent, proponents of neoliberalism sound as if they are doing poor people, the environment, and everybody else a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few. The

And ever since then, every time popular movements have succeeded in dissolving power to a certain extent, there has been a deepening recognition amount elites in the west that as you begin to lose the power to control people by force you have to start to control what they think.

Both parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period of the past generation. Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called "moderate Republicans." Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a "radical insurgency" that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics. With