Quotes from Noam Chomsky

Management," according to the neorealists, means maintaining the conflict as "a low intensity confrontation"—which means the loss of local, human lives, without any damage to the mediating superpower.

six corporations control 90 percent of what we read, watch, or listen to. Six corporations. It's a little bit mystifying for me to put it that way. When I say six corporations, it makes it sound as though there's nobody there really making decisions, but in fact corporations don't decide, people in them decide things. We'll talk about the ways in which these corporations decide things in a minute. In

Colombia has had by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980's wound down. The correlation between US aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship.

I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.

So these six corporations, and more precisely, the key decision makers within them, set the boundaries on acceptable debate on what's socially, politically, economically possible.

The real question raised was not: Did Nixon employ evil methods against his political adversaries? but rather: Who were the victims? The answer is clear. Nixon was condemned, not because he employed reprehensible methods in his political struggles, but because he made a mistake in the choice of adversaries against whom he turned these methods. He attacked people with power. ? Noam Chomsky, On Language

That is the nature of being well educated. It is to accept the framework of power and not question it.

how much time and energy is devoted, and not to the issues that the candidates are raising, but simply to their relative strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis their electability: the personalities, the horse race, not the issues and so forth.

Among the many reasons for regarding the fabled American exceptionalism with some skepticism is that the doctrine appears to be close to a historical universal, including the worst monsters: Hitler, Stalin, the conquistadors; it is hard to find an exception. Aggression and terror are almost invariably portrayed as self-defense and dedication to inspiring visions.

I don't have anything against bulldozers. I think they're great. A lot easier than digging with a shovel.

To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it's maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You're not supposed to say this. It's considered a conspiracy theory.

One jet plane means this many fewer schools and hospitals.

Anarchism is necessarily anti-capitalist in that it "opposes the exploitation of man by man.

The Chief is an infantile megalomaniac, and very effective con man, who couldn't care less if the world burns or explodes, as long as he can pretend to be the winner as he two-steps over the cliff waving his little red hat triumphantly.

Basically, the idea of the aristocrats is that power has to be vested in a special class of particularly distinguished and privileged people, who will make the decisions and do the right thing.

Anarchism is necessarily anti-capitalist in that it "opposes the exploitation of man by man." But anarchism also opposes "the dominion of man over man." It insists that "socialism will be free or it will not be at all. In its recognition of this lies the genuine and profound justification for the existence of anarchism.

The gospels are radical pacifist material. When the emperor Constantine adopted Christianity he shifted it. He shifted Christianity from a radical pacifist religion to the religion of the Roman empire. So the cross, which was symbol of the suffering of the poor was put on the shield of roman soldiers. Since that time the church has been pretty much the church of the rich and the powerful.

Then there are other media, too, their role is quite different: it's diversion... The purpose of those media is just to dull people's brains; to get them to watch national football... or get involved in astrology or fundamentalist stuff, just get them away, get them away from things that matter. And for that it's important to reduce their capacity to think.

language acquisition is not a step-by-step process of generalization, association, and abstraction, going from linguistic data to the grammar, and that the subtlety of our understanding transcends by far what is presented in experience.

Sede Hanibal Barca i Filip II u nekom kafi?u i pricaju o ratnim taktima , kad nailazi odnekud oftamolog te im rekne - A jelte vas dvojica , da nijeste možda naletili na Vasilija Drugog Bugaroubicu? xoxoxoxoxo

But from the point of view of the masters of mankind, it doesn't matter much—"as long as we make plenty of profit tomorrow, who cares if our grandchildren won't have a world to live in?

When everyone says the same thing about some complex topic, what should come to your mind is, 'wait a minute, nothing can be that simple, something's wrong.' That's the immediate light that should go off in your brain when you ever hear unanimity on some complex topic. (The Ezra Klein Show 2021/04/23)

When you conquer somebody and suppress them, you have to have a reason for it. You can't just say 'I'm a son of a bitch' and I wanted to rob them. So you have to say it's for their good or they deserve it or they actually benefit from it and we're helping them and so on.

What, beyond very basic physiological requirements, defines needs, and what marks the point when we move from needs into wants. This is a very slippery category, one that is quite explicitly exploited by the advertising and marketing fields, whose entire job is to convert wants into needs.