Quotes from Noam Chomsky

Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?

In November 2008, the day of the presidential election, Israeli military forces invaded Gaza and killed half a dozen Hamas militants. Well, that was followed by a missile exchange for a couple of weeks in both directions.

The call for debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.

The Oslo Accords in 1993 determined that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are a single territorial entity which cannot be divided. Immediately, the United States and Israel set about separating the two and making sure that they would not be united.

From the U.S. point of view, negotiations are, in effect, a way for Israel to continue its policies of systematically taking over whatever it wants in the West Bank, maintaining the brutal siege on Gaza, separating Gaza from the West Bank and, of course, occupying the Syrian Golan heights, all with full U.S. support.

The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.

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 western mantra is that Israel seeks negotiations without preconditions, while the Palestinians refuse. The opposite is more accurate.

The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.

In 1949, China declared independence - an event known in Western discourse as 'the loss of China' in the U.S. - with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss.

Colombia has been the leading western recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence has grown through the '90s.

It doesn't take long to become aware of the presence of the CIA in Laos.

The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.

The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.

The childcare tax credit makes some sense.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

Maybe the science is uncertain, maybe we don't have to worry about it. Climate change is the worst, but there's others.

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.

Under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.

To live a life of honesty and integrity is a responsibility of every decent person.

Fidel Castro, whatever people may think of him, is a hero in Latin America, primarily because he stood up to the United States.

Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.