Noam Chomsky Quotes

The U.S. is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis.

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

The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.

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

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.

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

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

I didn’t pay my taxes for years.

The country that consistently ranks among the highest in educational achievement is Finland. A rich country, but education is free. Germany, education is free. France, education is free.

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

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

The U.S. is just in a class by itself in military expenses. It basically matches the rest of the world, and it’s far more advanced.

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

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

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

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

Perhaps the most striking assault on the foundations of traditional liberties is a little-known case brought to the Supreme Court by the Obama administration, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.