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As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination', we might say - exercised through the mass media.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

I like Gramsci. He's an important person.

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

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.

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

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.

In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

Governments don't control people like they used to.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

I don't like the intellectual label.

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

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

I don't have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

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