Quotes from Noam Chomsky

Chomsky also reveals how neoliberalism is hardly a new thing, but merely the current version of the battle for the wealthy few to circumscribe the political rights and civic powers of the many. Chomsky

anyone can consider what he now knows and can ask what he knew twenty years ago, and can see that in some unclear fashion he was striving towards something which he can only now understand … if he is fortunate.

The report defines acts of ethnic cleansing as including the separation of men from women, the detention of men, and the destruction of houses and their repopulation by another ethnic group later on. This was precisely the repertoire of the Jewish soldiers in the 1948 war.

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable.

A major question was to what extent should we permit real democracy? Madison discussed this pretty seriously, not so much in the Federalist Papers—which were kind of propaganda—but in the debates of the Constitutional Convention, which are the most interesting place to look. If you read the debates, Madison said the major concern of the society—any decent society—has to be to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." His phrase.

Si credono i padroni dell'umanità e purtroppo lo stanno diventando: la politica democratica ha cessato di resistere loro, spianando la strada alla dittatura incondizionata dei poteri forti, economici e finanziari, che ormai dettano le condizioni della nostra vita pubblica.

anarchosyndicalist Fernand Pelloutier asked: "Must even the transitory state to which we have to submit necessarily and fatally be the collectivist jail? Can't it consist in a free organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and consumption, all political institutions having disappeared?

that's what faced the soldiers who were massacring each other in the trenches in the First World War. They were fighting for nothing. They were fighting for the right to destroy each other. And in that kind of circumstance no questions of justice arise

lo que debemos hacer es tratar de entender la verdad acerca del mundo. Y la verdad acerca del mundo es generalmente bastante fea.

The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a specialized tool of production, might in principle be overcome, rather than enhanced, with the proper development and use of technology, but not under the conditions of autocratic control of production by those who make man an instrument to serve their ends, overlooking his individual purposes

The breakdown is not caused by economic laws. They are policies, a kind of class war initiated by the rich and powerful against the working population and the poor.

As another example to amplify this point, there's been an enormous amount of coverage in the last week or so of the declaration of an emergency, to justify building a wall on the southern US border.

It is true that they are less inflamed than formerly by political passions properly speaking; but do you not see that their passions, far from being political, have become social? Do you not see that, little by little, ideas and opinions are spreading amongst them which aim not merely at removing such and such laws, such a ministry or such a government, but at breaking up the very foundations of society itself?

As Chomsky says, if you act like there is no possibility of change for the better, you guarantee that there will be no change for the better. The choice is ours, the choice is yours. Robert

August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but — so the evidence suggests — not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts

they don't even mention the logical possibility of a third position: namely, that the United States did not have the right, either the legal or the moral right, to intervene by force in the internal affairs of Vietnam. We leave to history the task of judging the debate between the hawks and the respectable doves, but the third position, opposed to the other two, is excluded from discussion.

On this side, one of the things we're concerned about is the quest for infinite growth (an unavoidable feature of capitalism) on a finite planet. With that imperative, the biosphere is now subsumed under the economy. This has to be reversed. That is, the biosphere is now seen in strictly utilitarian terms to be simply a storehouse of resources, and/or a receptacle for waste.

Tis to work and have such pay As just keeps life from day to day In your limbs, as in a cell For the tyrants' use to dwell, … 'Tis to be slave in soul And to hold no strong control Over your own wills, but be All that others make of ye.

So, think about the enormous effort, the enormous, strenuous, and continuous effort to persuade people that things that they merely want are really things that they must have, that they need. And this is the business of marketing and advertising. And as Noam pointed out previously, this completely distorts the notion of the so-called free market in which rational people make rational choices based on real needs.

The invasion was undertaken with the expectation that it probably would increase the threat of terror. That was the advice given by the government's own intelligence agencies and by others, by lots of specialists on terror, who said it was very likely to increase terror, for

One is rapidly widening wealth and income inequality. US wealth increased by eight and a half trillion dollars in 2017, with the richest 2 percent getting about $1.15 trillion. That figure is more than the total cost of Medicaid and the complete safety net

that the Kremlin does not serve the interests of the peoples of the world, but makes them serve its own interests; that, with a treachery and hypocrisy without parallel, it makes use of the international working class as a mere pawn in its political intrigues.

the educational systems are oriented to maintaining the existing social and economic structures instead of transforming them

En cuanto a la responsabilidad de los intelectuales, no me parece que haya mucho que decir más allá de algunas verdades simples: los intelectuales son privilegiados; el privilegio genera oportunidad y la oportunidad confiere responsabilidades. Un individuo puede elegir.