Top 1898 Quotes & Sayings by Noam Chomsky - Page 32

When you read about the end of the Soviet Union, it's always about the "death of socialism." They never say "the death of democracy." But it makes about the same sense.

The people who are unemployed want to do the work, but the system is such a catastrophic failure that it cannot bring together idle hands and work. This is all hailed as a great success, and it is a great success - for a very small sector of the population.

As to whether those who fit the common meaning of the term "intellectual" should act in the manner that [ Edward] Said prescribes, that's another question. Needless to say, I agree with him that they should, and that they commonly do not.

One can neither agree nor disagree with a terminological proposal, as long as it is clear that it is just that: terminological.

We don't live in tyrannies, you know, the king doesn't decide what's legitimate, and there's much more freedom than there was in the past.

[My father] came over as an immigrant and didn't know any English. He went to work at a sweat shop in Baltimore. He told me later that this guy was coming around, and the guy seemed to be for the workers, so he signed up. It turned out that guy was an IWW organizer . My father didn't regret signing up; he just really didn't know what was going on.

We don't think about it, but it has a tremendous effect. But these are things you don't see right in front of your eyes. You need to think about them a little, to see what the consequences are.

Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system.

[Ronald] Reagan bitterly hated unions and wanted them destroyed. This began with the air controllers' strike and went on from there.

Technology can be used that way and it can also be used in other ways.

Education is not for profit. If you're not in education for profit, it's not going to be a fair critique for education.

The United States is alone among all the countries in that it does not permit US military forces to be under any threat. Other countries are willing to have forces in peace-keeping operations where they sometimes are under threat, but the US is not willing to do that.

If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion.

As far as DSA is concerned, I'm perfectly happy to be associated with it while disagreeing with a large part of the leadership.

Small changes can magnifiy. The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.

[Companies that specialized in how to destroy unions] don't make it a secret, and they have all sorts of techniques for management to destroy unions.

I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they're becoming more diverse, like in Europe.

Sectors of power are not going to favor the flourishing of dissidence.

In fact, Clinton-era publications of the US Space Command describe control over space as a parallel to control over the oceans a century ago. Then, countries built navies to protect and enhance their power in commercial and strategic interests. Today, the militarization of space is intended to protect US investments and commercial interest and US hegemony around the world.

I would, however, question the implication that there is some novelty in this beyond modalities [of Mikhail Bakunin], which naturally change as institutions change and develop.

The "end of history" has been proclaimed many times, always falsely.

If some small storekeeper somewhere decides he's not going to pay the money, the Godfather doesn't let him get away with it. The money doesn't mean anything to him, but he sends in his goons to beat him to a pulp. You have to establish credibility, otherwise conformity to your orders will tend to erode. International affairs runs in much the same way.

We're human beings; we're not robots. And face-to-face contact is something totally different than typing a text message and then forgetting about it.

The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet.

Luckily for [Barack] Obama, the Russians came along and rescued him with this proposal [to confiscate Assad's chemical weapons] which he quickly accepted - it was a way out of the embarrassment of facing likely defeat. They still have the option of bombing if they want to. And incidentally, to add one comment about this, you'll notice that this would be a very good moment to institute a call for imposing the Chemical Weapons Convention on the Middle East.

I organized tax resistance in 1965, with a friend. I kept at it for about ten years. I don't see it as a principle, it's a tactic. And I felt I had exhausted its potential as a tactic right about then, so I stopped.

I just went along with political activists and interested in other intellectual interests which I pursued kind of at random. I never had a real college education. I got a degree, but it was just patching together courses here and there.

I've already supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

NAFTA and GATT are quite similar. They both have highly protectionist elements. They're kind of a mixture of liberalization and protection designed to expand the power of transnational corporations. They're very basically investor's rights agreements. One crucial part in both is the "intellectual property right," which is a funny way of saying that corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, will have near-monopolistic rule over future technology. This now includes product as well as process rights.

Over the years, there's been case after case when there were very narrow decisions that had to be made about whether to launch nuclear weapons in serious cases. What is this guy [Donald Trump] going to do if his vaunted negotiating skills fail, if somebody doesn't do what he says? Is he going to say, "Okay we'll nuke them? We're done?"

When geologists announced the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, humans destroying the environment, one of the main things they pointed to is the use of plastics in the earth.

[Mikhail Bakunin] expectations were generally confirmed, including his prediction that some would seek to gain state power on the backs of popular revolution, then constructing a "Red bureaucracy" that would be one of the worst tyrannies in history, while others would recognize that power lies elsewhere and would serve as its apologists, becoming mystifies, "disablers," and managers while demanding the right to function in "technocratic isolation," in World Bank lingo.

Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.

My grandchildren are on social media all the time, and they think they have friends. But it's not what I would've called a friend, ever.

I'm into eating as little as possible... I never cook. Never use the stove or anything.

With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.

I don't buy much. Almost buy nothing. I buy what I need, do it the easiest way possible.

The intellectual world is deeply conformist... We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense.