Quotes from Noam Chomsky

No podemos evitar abordar cuestiones complejas y controvertidas —especialmente cuando son significativas desde el punto de vista humano— con un punto de vista definido, con intereses personales, si se quiere, y estos intereses tienen que ser evidentes, de manera que aquellos a los que nos dirigimos puedan entender de dónde venimos en nuestras opciones e interpretaciones de los hechos de la historia.

The new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. This is not pointed at anyone. —Max Planck

one element in the social revolution will be "that intelligent and truly noble part of the youth which, though belonging by birth to the privileged classes, in its generous convictions and ardent aspirations, adopts the cause of the people.

Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"—but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice—it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

El término «Estados Unidos» se usa convencionalmente para referirse no tanto al país, como a sus estructuras de poder; acompaña el término de «interés nacional», que es concretamente el interés de esos grupos de poder y se corresponde poco con las necesidades de la población en general.

We make the point that for societies that purport to be democratic, consent, based upon a constantly reinforced common sensical understanding of the legitimacy of the rulers, is not only the most desirable form of governance, but is necessary to maintain the veneer (whether thick or thin) of democracy itself.

As a child, Chomsky was influenced by the radical Jewish intellectual culture in New York City, where he regularly visited newsstands and bookstores with anarchist literature. According to Chomsky, this was a "working class culture with working class values, solidarity, socialist values."4

there are moments clearly when the seeming solidity of the governance structures are revealed to be rather fragile. And when they are, this is a moment when people begin to call into question all kinds of things about the way in which their society operates. So legitimation crises are extremely troubling moments for governance structures and for elites. As Hall is arguing here, this is invariably the case. And people who want radical change need to be prepared for those moments.

part of the potency of the common sense, is to rule out our thinking any differently about the world. That is, to subjugate our own mental capacity to imagine the world otherwise.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology, and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the "responsibility of peoples," given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

Hoy la política se ha reducido a una aventura lucrativa en la que se busca, sobre todo, que las inversiones sean rentables más que contribuir a la reconstrucción de un entorno, una comunidad o una nación muy degradados. Ese es uno de los beneficios que los planes de ajuste estructural le ha impuesto al continente: la entronización de la corrupción».

It's necessary for the capitalists to find on the market the commodity that produces more value than it itself costs. That's the trick. This unique commodity is labor power, and is the only element in the process that produces surplus value, which is the source of profit. It's a unique commodity in that regard. How does this work? Fortunately, there is a simple answer. I hate to be bearer of bad news, but this is how it works: exploitation of the worker.

What I hear as noise is perceived as music by my teenage grandchildren, at a fairly primitive level of perceptual experience. And

si quieres derribar un gobierno, armas a su ejército y, por supuesto, haces difícil que funcione el gobierno civil.

Amnesia constrains ambition and inoculates against patience. Still

driving the parties into the pockets of concentrated capital, increasingly financial: the Republicans reflexively, the Democrats—by now what used to be moderate Republicans—not far behind.

Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her child has to learn "personal responsibility" by not accepting state welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don't agree with that at any level. In fact, I think it's grotesque at any level.

In all post-emancipation societies the balance between the possibility of land ownership and self-sufficiency for ex-slaves and their dependence on wager labor determined the tightness of this labor control. In the US South planters effectively transformed ex-slaves into an agricultural proletariat with a gamut of labor relations ranging from tenancy to sharecropping to debt-peonage. The necessary political corollary of this labor system was the preservation of white supremacy.

Whenever I hear a four-syllable word I get skeptical, because I want to make sure you can't say it in monosyllables.

En Estados Unidos, el país más rico del mundo, que posee ventajas sin igual e instituciones democráticas estables, pero que a la vez está, más que ninguna otra sociedad, bajo el dominio de los hombres de negocios.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

And since one of the main purposes of social policy is to keep the population passive, people with power are going to want to eliminate anything that tends to encourage the population to get involved in planning?because popular involvement threatens the monopoly of power by business, and it also stimulates popular organizations, and mobilizes people, and probably would lead to redistribution of profits, and so on.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.

Most people are not liars. They can't tolerate too much cognitive dissonance. I don't want to deny that there are outright liars, just brazen propagandists. You can find them in journalism and in the academic professions as well. But I don't think that's the norm. The norm is obedience, adoption of uncritical attitudes, taking the easy path of self-deception.