Quotes from Noam Chomsky

As always in the past, one can choose to be a democrat in Jefferson's sense, or an aristocrat. The latter path offers rich rewards, given the locus of wealth, privilege and power, and the ends it naturally seeks. The other path is one of struggle, often defeat, but also rewards that cannot be imagined by those who succumb to 'the New Spirit of the Age: Gain Wealth, forgetting all but Self.

deficit reduction is the demand of the financial institutions and the superrich, and in a rapidly declining democracy, that's what counts.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

The original notion of production, historically, anthropologically, was for use only. That is, the interaction between people and the physical world produced goods that were useful.

Since democratic leaders can't wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding and have to engineer consent to socially constructive goals and values, some obvious questions arise. Who makes the decisions about these goals and values? What factors enter into the decisions of "democratic leaders"? How is their "responsibility" and dedication to the public interest established?

The beginning of science is the recognition that the simplest phenomena of ordinary life raise quite serious problems: Why are they as they are, instead of some different way?

The commodity includes two components: use value; that is, the commodity has to be useful for someone for something. Under capital, however, a commodity also has to have this other essential element, which is exchange value. That is, it has to be capable, in addition to it being useful, of carrying something that the society values.

Settler colonialism is a conceptual fine-tuning on the theories and histories of colonialism. Settler movements that sought a new life and identity in already inhabited countries were not unique to Palestine.

if you assume that there is no hope,then you guarantee that there will be no hope. if you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is possibility that you can contribute to making a better world

Not even mentioned is the possibility, discussed by economist Dean Baker, that the deficit might be eliminated if the dysfunctional privatized health care system were replaced by one similar to those in other industrial societies, which have half the per capita costs and at least comparable health outcomes.

When specialization and exchange become generalized, there is a need for something called a universal equivalent.

The principle of universality is not a 'theory'. Just moral truism.

cuando el liderazgo estadounidense quiere estimular el apoyo de una intervención o agresión, solo tiene que gritar que ya vienen los rusos.

Syntactic Structures and LSLT.

If you go back to a century ago, the major problems of electrical and mechanical engineering had to do with how to place a huge gun on a moving platform, namely a ship, designing it to be able to hit a moving object, another ship, so naval gunnery. That was the most advanced problem in metallurgy, electrical and mechanical engineering, and so on. England and Germany put huge efforts into it, the United States less so. Out of associated innovations comes the automotive industry.

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.

siquiera son acuerdos comerciales, sino, básicamente, acuerdos de derechos de inversores.

The most influential of the Framers, James Madison, captured the dominant theme when he instructed the Convention that the government must "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.

Such facts cannot be perceived within educated circles if they hope to retain respectability.

en un extremo hay sociedades indígenas, tribales, que tratan de detener la carrera hacia el desastre. En el otro extremo, las sociedades más ricas y poderosas de la historia del mundo, como Estados Unidos y Canadá, corren a toda velocidad para destruir el entorno lo antes posible.

the autonomy of syntax;

ask you to think a little bit about what the media's products are, which I put out as a question before. Are they selling an entertainment thing? Are they selling news? Are they selling information? No. They're selling you. They're selling you to advertisers. You are their product. There's no question about that. So

Recall Bernard Fall's estimate that by April 1965, before the first North Vietnamese battalion was detected in the South, more than 160,000 "Viet Cong" had fallen "under the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and, finally, vomiting gases.

One choice is to assume the worst, and then you can be guaranteed that it'll happen. The other is to assume that there's some hope for change, in which case it's possible that you can help to effect change. So you've got two choices, one guarantees the worst will happen, the other leaves open the possibility that things might get better. Given those choices, a decent person doesn't hesitate.