Noam Chomsky Quotes

If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of control, then your world's gone. Like some unusual child who has a million toys and one of them is stolen, he's going to perish.

The Republican Party among the public is a minority party.

The US health-care system is a complete scandal. It's got twice the costs of comparable countries and some of the worst outcomes.

[Health-care system] is largely privatized and unregulated. So of course it's highly inefficient and costly.

[ Republican Party] is correctly described as a "radical insurgency" by one of the leading conservative commentators, Norman Ornstein.

[There is] is all part of the whole neoliberal shift in the economy. But the parties have shifted to the right.

Today's Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans a generation ago.

The Republicans went so far to the right that they just can't get votes. They've become a dedicated party of the very rich and the corporate sector.

The Republican Primaries were quite interesting. The establishment had its candidate, [Mitt] Romney, a kind of a Wall Street lawyer and investor, and they wanted him in. But the base didn't want him.

The government of Rwanda, which is a US client, is intervening massively, and Uganda to an extent. It's almost an international war in Africa. Well, how many people know about this?

It is the worst atrocity underway [in Rwanda]. But it's barely in the media, and people just don't know about it. And that's quite generally true.

A bombing was planned [in Syria], which would probably make the situation worse, but would at least establish US credibility.

The United States is the Godfather when it establishes edicts. Others had better live up to them, or else. We have to demonstrate that. So that's what the bombing of Syria was to have demonstrated.

There was very little international support, even England wouldn't support [bombing of Syria], which is amazing.

For the past century or so that's [ Monroe Doctrine] actually been true, but it's declining very significantly.

South America goes its own way dramatically in international affairs.

You also have to get beyond that to dismantle the system of production for profit rather than production for use. That means dismantling at least large parts of market systems.

Should a community... be free to enact legislation to say they don't want blacks? Now that's illegal. Fifty years ago it was legal. Is that progress or is that regress?

In the United States everyone is an illegal immigrant - everyone except the people in Indian Reservations. This is an immigrant society.

Free markets are based on the free circulation of labor. If you don't have free circulation of labor, you don't have free markets.

We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.

The UN can go as far as the U.S. will allow, and no further. And it's bound by conditions that the powerful states, which means mostly the U.S., impose.

The UN to some extent diffuses U.S. power. Therefore it's less direct an agency of the United States than the U.S. Army is. But still, it can't escape the distribution of power in the world.

As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.

In a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time. They're instinctive Marxists.

Procurement is a major technique of state subsidy.

The IMF economists were doubtless shaken by the extreme failures of their prescriptions over many years, and by the collapse of the intellectual edifice of economic theory on which they were relying.

After all, the internet originated around 1960 and wasn't privatized until 1995. That's thirty five years in the public domain during the hard, creative development period.

I don't know what it means to say that 'the internet should have a voice in Washington'.

Technology can also be used so that private individuals will have access to the way centralized decisions are being made.

Wikileaks is a democratizing force. Its giving individuals access to decisions and thinking by their representatives and in a democracy that ought to be reflexive.

But on the contrary Wikileaks is under heavy attack by the government and corporations are participating in that by closing down their websites.

Most of what is done I think is to kept secret so the public won't know. The same is true of what Wikileaks exposed.

What Wikileaks exposed is kind of superficial in a way.

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.

I happen to agree with the anti-dictatorship policies, but I don't think it's the role of General Electric to support them or oppose them. They do of course, but I don't agree with that.

It [the internet] probably has the effect of weakening personal associations.

Parts of the United States are taking on a Third World look.

The capacity to transfer production elsewhere is a weapon against the Western workers.

Workers in different countries can easily be played off against each other.

People have no human rights, only the rights that they can gain on the labour market. Above all, wealth and power have to be protected.

It is reported that about 30% of the world's population is unemployed. That's worse than the Great Depression, but it's now an international phenomenon.

You have 30% of the world unemployed, a huge amount of work, that needs to be done just rebuilding the society alone.

This is class war on an international scale, and power is in the hands of those who control the international economic system.

I agree with Bill Clinton that US forces should not be sent to Haiti, but not for his reasons.

On intervention under the UN framework, I think that sometimes that's legitimate, in fact even helpful.

There are many cases around the world in which the presence of UN peace-keeping forces has had a somewhat beneficial effect.

Today, aid to Colombia is given under the pretext of a drug war. That's pretty hard to take seriously. Ten years ago, Amnesty International flatly called it a myth.

A big producer can survive price fluctuations on the world market. A small farmer can't.

It's not in doubt that tobacco is far more lethal than hard drugs.