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 .

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

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 best political leaders are the ones that are lazy and corrupt

Education is a system of imposed ignorance

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

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

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

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past

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

The rascal multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions

The U.S. is the only country condemned by the World Court for international terrorism-for "the unlawful use of force" for political ends

Advertising is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled

As long as people are marginalized and distracted (they) have no way to organize or articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these sentiments. People assume that they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that. ... Since there's no way to get together with other people who share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something else, like the Superbowl

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate

The best defense against democracy is to distract people

...(Sports) offers people to pay attention to, that's of no importance... that keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives, that they might have some idea of doing something about... but the point is, it does make sense! It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements... and you know, in fact, it's training in irrational jingoism

First I should say that the US picked them up (Nazi methods of terrorism) and began carrying them out itself, often against the same targets. But the military also studied the Nazi methods, published interesting studies, sometimes critical of them because they were inefficiently carried out, so a critical analysis, you didn't do this right, you did that right and are the manuals, and are the procedures that are being used. So it's not just that the Nazis did it. It's that it was regarded as the right thing to do by the leaders of western civilization, that is us, who then proceeded to do it themselves. Terrorism is not the weapon of the weak. It is the weapon of those who are against ‘us' whoever ‘us' happens to be. And if you can find a historical exception to that, I'd be interested in seeing it

Noam Chomsky