Noam Chomsky Quotes

If you do a Google search, you will probably read a lot of stuff about how I am someone who wants to kill all the Jews and hates the United States.

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

The prescription for endless war poses a far greater danger to Americans than perceived enemies do, for reasons the terrorist organisations understand very well.

State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.

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.

Occasionally the conflict between ‘what we stand for’ and ‘what we do’ has been forthrightly addressed.

If you want to control a population… give them a God to worship.

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.

The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.

If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

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.

Nicaragua dealt with the problem of terrorism in exactly the right way. It followed international law and treaty obligations. It collected evidence, brought the evidence to the highest existing tribunal, the International Court of Justice, and received a verdict – which, of course, the U.S. dismissed with contempt.

Obama, of course, outspent McCain.

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.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

Democratic societies can’t force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.

I’ve been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan’s vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more.

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.

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.

The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it’s likely to harm them.

I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

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

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

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.

It makes sense for Japan to pursue a more independent role in the world, following Latin America and others in freeing itself from U.S. domination.

Thanh Hoa itself is a rich agricultural province. Rice fields, a pattern of many shades of green, stretch far into the distance along the road, which also winds through foothills and the fringes of heavy jungle where tigers are said to roam. The vegetation, wild or cultivated, is lush.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

I didn’t pay my taxes for years.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

Clinton himself acted in ways which increased the threat of terror.

Iran has little capacity to deploy force. Its strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to set it.

The American claim that the bombing of North Vietnam was directed against military targets does not withstand direct investigation.

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

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he’s regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

Concentration of executive power, unless it’s very temporary and for specific circumstances, let’s say fighting world war two, it’s an assault on democracy.

I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.

A siege is an act of war.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

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.

Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.

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?’

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.

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.

If voting could actually change anything, it would be illegal.

Some international law specialists compare the invasion of Iraq to the ‘crimes against the peace’ for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg.

It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what’s called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

The government of Israel doesn’t like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world.

Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.

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

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.

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.

The appropriate response to terrorist crimes is police work, which has been successful worldwide.

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison – they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be – protect themselves. That’s why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

I know some really outstanding Turkish journalists, and have been pleased and honored to be able to join with them a few times in their courageous protests against state terror and repression.

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.

The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.

Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy – their own population.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the ‘engineering of consent’ by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

Spaniards were condemned for appeasing terrorism by voting for withdrawing troops from Iraq in the absence of U.N. authorization – that is, for taking a stand rather like that of 70 percent of Americans, who called for the U.N. to take the leading role in Iraq.

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

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

Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use – a cynic might say that this is why they continue to exist.

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.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

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.

There’s plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can’t duplicate that on blogs.

The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues, and that’s not their concern.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

Under Clinton, the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts.

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.

Control is the source of strategic power.

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 1963, the U.N. Security Council declared a voluntary arms embargo on South Africa. That was extended to a mandatory embargo in 1977. And that was followed by economic sanctions and other measures – sometimes officials, countries, cities, towns – some organized by popular movements.

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

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

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

Meteorologists are pretty faces reading scripts telling you whether it’s going to rain tomorrow.

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.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ to use the currently fashionable phrase.

There was unprecedented elite condemnation of the plans to invade Iraq. Sensible analysts were able to perceive that the enterprise carried significant risks for U.S. interests, however conceived.

Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s – the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.

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

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

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.

As international support for Obama’s decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world.

On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.

Obama’s policies have been approximately the same as Bush’s, though there have been some slight differences, but that’s not a great surprise. The Democrats supported Bush’s policies.

From the late 1940s, into and through the ’50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.

The U.S. has the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world, has about twice the per capita costs, and some of the worst outcomes. It’s also the only privatized system.

Government actually grew during the Reagan years.

The ‘free-floating intellectual’ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.

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

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.

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.

In every country except – industrial country except the United States, the government uses its massive purchasing power to negotiate drug prices. That’s one of the reasons prices are so much higher in the United States than in other countries.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

Obama did organize a great large number of people and many enthusiastic people, what’s called in the press ‘Obama’s Army.’ But the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, to introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That’s critical.

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.

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people – along with despair about its future.

I’m about as monolingual as you come, but nevertheless, I have a variety of different languages at my command, different styles, different ways of talking, which do involve different parameter settings.

To say that the United States has pursued diplomacy with North Korea is a little bit misleading. It did under the Clinton administration, though neither side completely lived up to their obligations. Clinton didn’t do what was promised, nor did North Korea, but they were making progress.

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

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

There’s never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it’s mostly a fabrication.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

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.

When secular figures are turned into divinities, they way they are in Peian Yang or Stanford University – that I don’t like.

Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.

In 1979, Iranians carried out an illegitimate act: They overthrew a tyrant that the United States had imposed and supported, and moved on an independent path, not following U.S. orders.

I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

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

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you’re not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else’s mind.

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.

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

To summarize, draft resistance can make use of the inegalitarian nature of American society as a technique for increasing the cost of American aggression, and it threatens values that are important to those in a decision-making position.

The public is strongly in favor of the Kyoto Protocols, so strongly in favor that a majority of Bush voters thought that he was in favor of it. They are simply unaware.

One of the most interesting reactions to come out of 1968 was in the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which believed there was a ‘crisis of democracy’ from too much participation of the masses.

It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

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.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning.

For many of the world’s conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement.

We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.

The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials – literally, which is why I’m teaching at MIT.

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.

The U.N. charter bars the threat of force.

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.

An individual’s refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.

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.

The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it’s a major problem, that’s just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it.

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

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.

If workers are more insecure, that’s very ‘healthy’ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

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.

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

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.

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.

The U.S. has strategic and economic interests in Southeast Asia that must be secured. Holding Indochina is essential to securing these interests. Therefore, we must hold Indochina.

It is easy to dismiss the world as ‘irrelevant,’ or consumed by ‘paranoid anti-Americanism,’ but perhaps not wise.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organisational function – that’s important, and fine, and I support it.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today’s political scene.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

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.

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

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

Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn’t have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.

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.

Everyone who is critical of Israeli policy is deluged by crazed messages intended to flood their email system or, more insidiously, passwords are accessed and messages sent out under their name! I’m sure it’s illegal. It’s also an effort to undermine free speech.

Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.

I don’t see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that’s almost inconceivable.

There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

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.

There’s a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

Undoubtedly, the U.S. harbors leading international terrorists, people described by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department as leading terrorists, like Orlando Bosch, now Posada Carriles, not to speak of those who actually implement state terrorism.

The ‘peace movement’ exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.

Occupying armies have responsibilities, not rights. Their primary responsibility is to withdraw as quickly and expeditiously as possible, in a manner determined by the occupied population.

Well before September 11, it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.

The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.

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.

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

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.

If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don’t have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by ‘sophisticated’ methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.

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.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

My proposal happens to be very mainstream.

There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11.

There is no plausible theory under which the record of the Pentagon Papers can be interpreted as relating to the national defense.

The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on — because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.

There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‘renouncing beliefs’ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‘renounce beliefs’ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

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.

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the U.N. vetoed several resolutions right away, calling for an end to the fighting and so on, and that was a hideous invasion.

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

Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

I would feel no hesitation in saying that it is the responsibility of a decent human being to give assistance to a child who is being attacked by a rabid dog, but I would not intend this to imply that in all imaginable circumstances one must, necessarily, act in accordance with this general responsibility.

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands.

The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.

U.S. Government propaganda tries to give the impression that aerial bombardment achieves near-surgical accuracy, so that military targets can be destroyed with minimal effect on civilians. Technical documents give a different picture.

The whole infrastructure of air travel was, and is, part of government policy. It is not a natural development of a free economic system – at least not in the way that is claimed. The same is true of the roads, of course.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

It’s a good idea to revitalize community colleges, to cut back, to modify the student loan program so it doesn’t go through banks.

The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

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

When a politician uses the word ‘folks,’ we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

Obama himself has been highly supportive of Mubarak.

Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes… to an extent, that’s true elsewhere, including the United States, but it’s been pretty extreme in Greece.

The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as ‘failed states.’

On the Internet, you think everything is going to be public.

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.

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.

American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.

Part of the population of Laos lives in urban centers, Vientiane being the largest.

Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first place.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing.

Pakistan is not a unified country.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress ‘suspects.’

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital – in some cases, overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations.

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.

He who controls the media controls the minds of the public.

For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.

Somebody will be able to overcome any encryption technique you use!

As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.

The government argues that First Amendment rights are outweighed by the need to prosecute those who transmit classified information and documents.

Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.

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.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Armed attack has a definition in international law. It means sudden, overwhelming, instantaneous ongoing attack.

International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn’t pay his protection money. You have to have obedience; otherwise, the idea can spread that you don’t have to listen to the orders, and it can spread to important places.

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.

Chinese military spending is carefully monitored by the United States.

If you destroyed half the pharmaceutical production in the United States, we’d think it’s a pretty serious problem. In fact, we’d probably go to war.

Is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of the U.S.?

In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.

Popular struggles to bring about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though there is a long way to go, and there is often regression.

Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free.

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.

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

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.

You are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions.

The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‘among the most unspeakable crimes in history.’ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

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.

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

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

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

Unlike Iran, Israel refuses to allow inspections at all, refuses to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has hundreds of nuclear weapons, has advanced delivery systems.

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