Quotes from Noam Chomsky

I should also say that the policy issues that have to be faced are quite deep. It's always nice to have reforms. It would be nice to have more money for starving children. But there are some objective problems which you and I would have to face if we ran the country.

We, along with other analysts, call the prevailing common sense capitalist realism. We interpret this term to be not merely descriptive of the dominant political economic framework, but also to highlight proponents' additional assertion that there is really no meaningful alternative to organizing society along the lines of late-stage industrial state capitalism.

No tiene sentido propugnar la militancia cuando la población no está lista para ella, y para conseguir que lo esté no hay mayor secreto que el trabajo paciente. Puede resultar frustrante, si se considera que las amenazas existenciales son inminentes y muy reales, pero, en cualquier caso, se trata de etapas preliminares que no se pueden saltar.

George Orwell coined the useful term "unperson" for creatures denied personhood because they don't abide by state doctrine. We may add the term "unhistory" to refer to the fate of unpersons, expunged from history on similar grounds.

The business of voting your conscience is: Do you really care just about how you feel? or, Do you care about what happens to the world? If you care about what you feel you don't have any conscience, you're not a moral agent at all, so stop talking about conscience, you don't have any.

Lesser evil voting should be simply called elementary rationality and elementary morality.

We begin with the multipronged relationships between capitalism and the various historical and contemporary mechanisms that capitalists (and their vital partners within state systems) have used to spread this form of political economy around the globe. These processes have been known most commonly as colonialism or imperialism (in either their historical or neo- forms), and have often been accompanied by the often-necessarily related processes of militarism.

Propaganda is to Democracy what violence is to Totalitarianism

Merece la pena recordar que Estados Unidos, como Inglaterra antes, ha tendido a apoyar el fundamentalismo radical del islam en oposición al nacionalismo secular, que hasta hace poco se percibía como una mayor amenaza de independencia y contagio.

Apologists for state violence understand very well that the general public has no real stake in imperial conquest and domination. The public costs of empire may run high, whatever the gains to dominant social and economic groups. Therefore the public must be aroused by jingoist appeals, or at least kept disciplined and submissive, if American force is to be readily available for global management.

In a democratic society, we, the intelligent minority, have the duty of directing the "ignorant and stupid" masses to what we decide are proper goals, using whatever deception is required. All for their own good.

The question is whether distinct cognitive structures can be identified, which interact in the real use of language and linguistic judgments, the grammatical system being one of these. Certainly

If a concept or principle finds its place in an explanatory theory, it cannot be excluded on methodological grounds.

It's also the word Fox associates with Barack Obama, whom this generation's door-knocking helped elect but whose administration strengthened the corporate oligarchy, waged unaccountable robot wars, and imprisoned migrant workers and heroic whistleblowers at record rates. So much for "socialism.

El discurso de los privilegios está siempre marcado por la confianza y el triunfalismo: conocemos el camino que tenemos delante, y no hay otro camino.

The idea that you have to avoid teaching evolution or pretend you're not teaching it is unique in the industrial world. And the statistics are mind-boggling. Roughly half the population think the world was created a couple thousand years ago.

The role of intellectuals and radical activists, then, must be to assess and evaluate, to attempt to persuade, to organize, but not to seize power and rule

from 1960—remember the date—from 1960 to "the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and East European satellites.

Civil society is hardly more than a conspiracy by the rich to guarantee their plunder.

Occupy is really the first sustained response to this. People have referred to the Tea Party as a response, but that is highly misleading. The Tea Party is relatively affluent, white. Its influence and power come from the fact that it has enormous corporate support and heavy finance. Parts of the corporate world simply see them as their shock troops, but it's not a movement in the serious sense that Occupy is.

Of course, it was the United States and Israel that had rejected diplomacy and the PLO that had been offering compromise for years, but Lewis's reversal of the facts was quite normal and unchallenged in the mainstream.

International law and democracy are fine things—but as judged by outcome, not process; like free trade.

The Amalgamated Engineering and Foundryworkers' Union, for example, has adopted, as official policy, the program of nationalization of basic industries under "workers' control at all levels.

dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation.