Noam Chomsky

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.

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.

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

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

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

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.

Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.

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

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

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

In some ways, [the student anti-sweatshop movement] is like the anti-apartheid movement, except that in this case its striking at the core of the relations of exploitation. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.

If we move toward the weaponisation of space, we can bid farewell to the planet. The chances of survival are very slight.

I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.

Labor #‎ Unions are the leading force for #‎ democratization and #‎ progress .

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

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

There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them

There is no reason to believe ... that the "essential purpose" of language is "communication". Language can be used to transmit information, but it also serves many other purposes: to establish relations among people, to express or clarify thought, for play, for creative mental activity, to gain understanding, and so on. In my opinion, there is no reason to accord privileged status to one or the other of these modes.

Anything that you are achieving that undermines and threatens systems of power will meet with oppression. Systems of power don't say 'thank you.' What's important is not to focus all your efforts on the oppression, but to continue the constructive work.

There’s no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Genghis Khan.