Noam Chomsky Quotes And Sayings

A Siege Is An Act Of War.

Public Opinion In Egypt Is Very Antagonistic To The Way The Dictatorship, Mubarak Dictatorship, Interpreted Relations With Israel. Very Antagonistic.

The Poorest Country In South America, Bolivia, Had Been Devastated By Neoliberal Economic Policies.

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.

There Are Nuclear-weapons-free Zones In Several Parts Of The World Already, Except That They're Not Implemented Fully, Because The U.s. Won't Allow It.

The Country That Consistently Ranks Among The Highest In Educational Achievement Is Finland. A Rich Country, But Education Is Free. Germany, Education Is Free. France, Education Is Free.

There Are Very Few People Who Are Going To Look Into The Mirror And Say, 'That Person I See Is A Savage Monster;' Instead, They Make Up Some Construction That Justifies What They Do.

Today, We Have Private Airline Companies, But If You Take A Look At A Boeing Plane Next Time You Travel, You'll See That You Are Basically Taking A Ride On A Modified Bomber.

In Latin America, Specialists And Polling Organisations Have, For Some Time, Observed That The Extension Of Formal Democracy Was Accompanied By An Increasing Disillusionment About Democracy And A Lack Of Faith In Democratic Institutions.

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.

As Soon As Questions Of Will Or Decision Or Reason Or Choice Of Action Arise, Human Science Is At A Loss.

How People Themselves Perceive What They Are Doing Is Not A Question That Interests Me.

I Remember At The Age Of Five Travelling On A Trolley Car With My Mother Past A Group Of Women On A Picket Line At A Textile Plant, Seeing Them Being Viciously Beaten By Security People. So That Kind Of Thing Stayed With Me.

There Is Massive Propaganda For Everyone To Consume. Consumption Is Good For Profits And Consumption Is Good For The Political Establishment.

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.

In The Academic World, Most Of The Work That Is Done Is Clerical. A Lot Of The Work Done By Professors Is Routine.

Markets Have Built In Inefficiencies, Serious Inefficiencies Which Are Well Known.

Now Financial Liberalization Is Just A Catastrophe Waiting To Happen, And There Are Very Well Understood Reasons For That.

If You're In Favour Of Any Policy - Reform, Revolution, Stability, Regression, Whatever - If You're At Least Minimally Moral, It's Because You Think It's Somehow Good For People. And Good For People Means Conforming To Their Fundamental Nature.

Humans Have Certain Properties And Characteristics Which Are Intrinsic To Them, Just As Every Other Organism Does. That's Human Nature.

When Britain And The U.s. Invaded Iraq, It Was With The Reasonable Expectation That It Was Going To Increase The Threat Of Terror, As It Has.

There Are Massive Efforts On The Part Of The Internet's Corporate Owners To Try To Direct It To Become A Technique Of Marginalisation And Control.

In America, The Professor Talks To The Mechanic. They Are In The Same Category.

In The Literal Sense, There Has Been No Relevant Evolution Since The Trek From Africa. But There Has Been Substantial Progress Towards Higher Standards Of Rights, Justice And Freedom - Along With All Too Many Illustrations Of How Remote Is The Goal Of A Decent Society.

State Formation Has Been A Brutal Project, With Many Hideous Consequences. But The Results Exist, And Their Pernicious Aspects Should Be Overcome.

My Proposal Happens To Be Very Mainstream.

I Like Gramsci. He's An Important Person.

It Is Pretty Ironic That The So-called 'Least Advanced' People Are The Ones Taking The Lead In Trying To Protect All Of Us, While The Richest And Most Powerful Among Us Are The Ones Who Are Trying To Drive The Society To Destruction.

If You're Working 50 Hours A Week To Try To Maintain Family Income, And Your Children Have The Kinds Of Aspirations That Come From Being Flooded With Television From Age One, And Associations Have Declined, People End Up Hopeless, Even Though They Have Every Option.

When I Look At Public Opinion, I'm Not Far Out Of The Mainstream. I'm In It, In Many Respects. In Some Respects, Public Opinion Goes Beyond Anything I've Ever Said.

Markets Are Lethal, If Only Because Of Ignoring Externalities, The Impacts Of Their Transactions On The Environment.

There Happen To Be A Lot Of People Around Who Spent An Hour On The Internet And Think They Know A Lot Of Physics, But It Doesn't Work Like That... There's A Reason There Are Graduate Schools In These Departments.

Meteorologists Are Pretty Faces Reading Scripts Telling You Whether It's Going To Rain Tomorrow.

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.

In The Late Fifties And Early Sixties, Opposition To State Terror And Aggression And Torture And So On Was Zero. That Was A Horrible Time: The Massive Kennedy Terror Operation Against Cuba, The First Attacks On Vietnam In 1962, The Imposition Of National Security States In South America.

My Father Was A Great Sympathizer Of Ahad Ha'am. Every Friday Night We Would Read Hebrew Together, And Often The Reading Was Ahad Ha'am's Essays.

In Much Of The World, There Is A Sense Of An Ultra-powerful Cia Manipulating Everything That Happens, Such As Running The Arab Spring, Running The Pakistani Taliban, Etc. That Is Just Nonsense.

The Iranian Government Is Undoubtedly A Severe Danger To Its Own Population, But Not Beyond That.

When Secular Figures Are Turned Into Divinities, They Way They Are In Peian Yang Or Stanford University - That I Don't Like.

Why Should Iran Have A Deterrent Strategy? Well, It's Surrounded By Hostile Enemies. Both Of Its Borders Have Been Under Occupation By A Hostile Superpower, The United States, Which Is Constantly Violating The U.n. Charter By Leaving Open What They Call The Saying, 'All Options Are Open' - Meaning The Threat Of War.

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.

A Financial Institution Has The Task Of Taking Risks, And If It's A Well Run Institution - Say, Goldman Sachs - It Tries To Cover The Potential Losses To Itself, But Only To Itself.

There Are Major Efforts Being Made To Dismantle Social Security, The Public Schools, The Post Office - Anything That Benefits The Population Has To Be Dismantled. Efforts Against The U.s. Postal Service Are Particularly Surreal.

In A Democracy, In A Functioning Democracy, What Would Be Happening Is That Popular Organizations, Unions, Political Groupings, Others Would Be Developing Their Programs, Putting Them Forth, Insisting That Their Representatives Implement Those Programs.

In The Late 19th Century There Was A Major Union Organization, Knights Of Labor, And Also A Radical Populist Movement Based On Farmers. It's Hard To Believe, But It Was Based In Texas, And It Was Quite Radical. They Wanted Their Own Banks, Their Own Cooperatives, Their Own Control Over Sales And Commerce.

If You Look Back At The History Of The Twentieth Century, Germany Alone Had Practically Destroyed Russia Several Times.

There Are Still Thousands Of People Dying Every Year In Laos, Mostly Children And Farmers, From Unexploded Anti-personnel Ordnance That The U.s. Simply Saturated Much Of The Land With, Especially In The Plain Of Jars. There Actually Is A British Engineering Team Trying To Remove Some Of These Things, Which Are Much Worse Than Land Mines.

Haitian Rice Farmers Are Quite Efficient, But They Can't Compete With U.s. Agribusiness That Relies On A Huge Government Subsidy, Thanks To Ronald Reagan's Free Market Enthusiasms.

In February 2004, The Two Traditional Torturers Of Haiti - France And The United States - Combined To Back A Military Coup And Send President Aristide Off To Africa. The U.s. Denies Him Permission To Return To The Entire Region.

France Had A Policy, Initiated By General De Gaulle, Of Trying To Turn Europe Into What Was Then Called A 'Third Force,' Independent Of The Two Superpowers, So Europe Should Pursue An Independent Course.