Noam Chomsky

In any institution-factory, university, health center, or whatever-there are a variety of interests that ought to be represented in decision-making: the work force itself, the community in which it is located, users of its products or services, institutions that compete for the same resources. These interests should be directly represented in democratic structures that displace and eliminate private ownership of the means of production or resources, an anachronism with no legitimacy.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn't communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.

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.

Bolivia is a striking example. The mostly white, Europeanized elite, which is a minority, happens to be sitting on most of the hydrocarbon reserves. For the first time Bolivia is becoming democratic. So it's therefore bitterly hated by the West, which despises democracy, because it's much too dangerous.

Democracy was regarded as entering into a crisis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large segments of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political arena.

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.

Violence can succeed, as Americans know well from the conquest of the national territory. But at terrible cost. It can also provoke violence in response, and often does.

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.

One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics, as he calls it - very outstanding political economist - which essentially - I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.

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

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can't explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

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

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