Noam Chomsky

Control is the source of strategic power.

A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it, too. But the government won't allow it.

In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we've seen with the Internet's development.

It's dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.

I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven - that's none of my business, ultimately. I won't lecture her on the philosophy of science.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination', we might say - exercised through the mass media.

By curious accident of history and geography, the world's major energy resources are located pretty much in Shiite regions. They're a minority in the Middle East, but they happen to be where the oil is, right around the northern part of the Gulf.

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression - thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.

As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states - no more, no less.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.

I don't usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this 'hopey changey stuff,' she was right: there was nothing there.

Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia - that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.

If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

I like Gramsci. He's an important person.

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.

Perhaps the most striking assault on the foundations of traditional liberties is a little-known case brought to the Supreme Court by the Obama administration, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.

If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself.

A tremendous amount of the entrepreneurial initiative, if you want to call it that, comes from the dynamic state sector on which most of the economy relies to socialize costs and risks and privatize eventual profit. And that's achieved by, if you like, advertising.

No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.

By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

Reparations - not just aid - should be provided by those responsible for devastating Iraqi civilian society by cruel sanctions and military actions, and - together with other criminal states - for supporting Saddam Hussein through his worst atrocities and beyond. That is the minimum that honesty requires.

The term 'globalisation' is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests.

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

Cuba has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since 1959, Cuba has been under attack from the hemispheric superpower.

Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs - hadn't been done for a long time, and it's illegal in most countries - in the air controller strike.

Civil disobedience's main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.

Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.