Quotes from Noam Chomsky

Education should not be a matter of pouring water into a vessel [...] it should be conceived as laying out a string along which learners proceed in their own ways, exercising and improving their creative capacities and imaginations, and experiencing the joy of discovery.

In the final analysis there can be no solid foundation for peace in the world so long as the super-Powers insist on taking unilateral military action whenever they claim to see a threat to their security"91—or, we may add, a threat to the perceived self-interest of dominant social groups.

undertaken with explicit directives reaching to such levels of criminality that they defy words, such as the infamous orders that Kissinger obediently transmitted to the US Air Force calling for "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves" (Becker)—a call for genocide that is hard to duplicate in the historical record.

In brief, if we are biological organisms, not angels, much of what we seek to understand might lie beyond our cognitive limits – maybe a true understanding of anything, as Galileo concluded, and Newton in a certain way demonstrated. That cognitive reach has limits is not only a truism but also a fortunate one; if there were no limits to human intelligence, it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no scope: we could achieve nothing by inquiry.

It is, indeed, virtual dogma that the function of language is communication.

The struggle against slavery went on forever, the struggle for women's rights has been going on for centuries, the effort to overcomewage slavery—that's been going on since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, we haven't advanced an inch. In fact, we're worse off than we were a hundred years ago in terms of understanding the issues. Well, okay, you just keep struggling.

it's always useful to look at the establishment Left, marking the limits of what it is OK to say. Lewis wrote in New York Times (May 1, 1975) that the war began with "blundering efforts to do good." How do we know that? Because it's an axiom, a necessary truth. If the United States did it, it was an effort to do good. You don't need any evidence for that. That's hegemonic common sense. Why "blundering efforts"? Because it didn't work.

Es sabido desde hace mucho tiempo que si se produjera un primer ataque de una gran potencia, incluso si ninguna otra respondiera, probablemente destruiría la civilización por las consecuencias del invierno nuclear que provocaría. Hay información sobre este asunto en el Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, así que es bien conocido. El peligro siempre ha sido mucho más grave de lo que pensábamos

conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, while the value-oriented are punished in one way or another. The

T]hey attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude, Ã¢â'¬Â¦ without thinking that it is the same for freedom as for innocence and virtue—their value is felt only as long as one enjoys them oneself and the taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them.

They all know exactly what they're doing, not just the reporters and the editors of the major press, but also the CEOs of the energy and financial corporations. And, of course, also the political leaders. They're not illiterate.

Presumption of innocence has also been given a new and useful interpretation. As the New York Times later reported, "Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

A sit-down strike is just one step short of saying, "Look, instead of sitting down, we'll run this place. We don't need owners and managers." That's huge. That could be done in Detroit and in other places that are being closed down.

If the traditional victims see matters somewhat differently, that merely reveals their moral and intellectual backwardness. And

It's all quite predictable, as study after study shows. A brutal tyrant crosses the line from admirable friend to "villain" and "scum" when he commits the crime of independence. One common mistake is to go beyond robbing the poor—which is just fine—and to start interfering with the privileged, eliciting opposition from business leaders.

There are plenty of young people who are appalled by the behaviour of the older generation, rightly, and are dedicated to trying to stop this madness before it consumes us all. Well, that's the hope for the future.

What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.

An independent mind must seek to separate itself from official doctrine –and from the criticism advanced by its alleged opponent.

The Vietnam War was fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming a successful model of economic and social development for the Third World.

Part of the whole capitalist ethic is that the only thing that matters is how much money you make tomorrow: that's the crucial value of the system, profit for tomorrow. Not just profit, but the bottom line has to look good tomorrow. And the result is that planning for the future, and any kind of regulatory apparatus that would sustain the environment for the long-term, become impossible?and that means the planet is going to go down the tubes very fast.

As far as money and politics are concerned, it's hard to beat the comment of the great political financier, Mark Hanna. About a century ago, he was asked what was important in politics. He answered, "The first is money, the second one is money and I've forgotten what the third one is.

Un estudio concluye que «Estados Unidos tenía más muertes al final del siglo XIX debido a la violencia laboral, en términos absolutos y como proporción de la población total, que cualquier otro país salvo la Rusia zarista».3 El término «violencia laboral» es una forma educada de referirse a la violencia del Estado y de la seguridad privada contra los obreros. Eso continuó hasta finales de la década de 1930;

To challenge the right of investors to determine who lives, who dies, and how they live and die—that would be a significant move toward Enlightenment ideals (actually the classical liberal ideal). That would be revolutionary.

A senior Israeli intelligence officer explained that the IDF attacked "both aspects of Hamas—its resistance or military wing and its dawa, or social wing," the latter a euphemism for the civilian society.