Noam Chomsky

The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

After my first year of college, each course I took in every field was so boring that I didn't even go to the classes.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. 'Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won't? How do I know there's anything there except what I'm conscious of?'

The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa's major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.

The U.S. - the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that's hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.

In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers, but not against the United States.

The United States is a violent military state. It's been involved in military action all over the place.

Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don't just succumb.

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

China is a great manufacturing center, but it's actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial - more advanced industrial centers - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe - and it basically assembles them.

There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.

The Occupy movement is - it was a big surprise.

The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.

I don't see anything that's come out on WikiLeaks that was a legitimate secret.

WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for - presidential medal of honor.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that's so deep in history that there's no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

The 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws.

The close Turkish-Israeli relations go back to the late 1950s - military intelligence, commercial, more recently, tourism and cultural relations.

What's important in Libya is, first of all, it has a good deal of oil. A lot of the country is unexplored; there may be a lot more. And it's very high-quality oil, so very valuable.

Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It's minuscule, few percent.

The invasion of Iraq, particularly, gave a big shot in the arm to the jihadi extremists.

The list of U.S. vetoes at the Security Council to protect Israeli aggression and occupation is huge.

The U.S. and its allies will do anything they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world.

By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

My family was mostly unemployed working class.

There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that's been going on since the Second World War.

When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

Government actually grew during the Reagan years.

The doctrine that everything is fine as long as the population is quiet, that applies in the Middle East, applies in Central America, it applies in the United States.

Obama's primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.

Egypt is the second-largest recipient over a long period of U.S. military and economic aid. Israel is first.

Obama himself has been highly supportive of Mubarak.

A siege is an act of war.

The Tea Party movement itself is maybe 15, 20 percent of the electorate. It's relatively affluent, white, nativist. You know, it has rather traditional nativist streaks to it. But what is much more important, I think, is the - is its outrage.

If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.

I have been - I have spoken in Bir Zeit a number of times.

In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, '69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it's worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started - an outright war started in 1962.

Terrorists regard themselves as a vanguard. They're trying to mobilize others to their cause. I mean, every specialist on terrorism knows that.

I didn't pay my taxes for years.

Civil disobedience is - it's no fun.

I don't think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.

The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics - greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

I have never really thought that the Left was much in 'array' as far as political purposes were concerned.

If you want to achieve something, you build the basis for it.

Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.