"The general public are not even aware of major decisions that will determine their fate, hence are in no position to influence them"
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Quote collection
Noam Chomsky quotes (page 7 of 84)
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"We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on."
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"It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them."
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"In a capitalist system, there's a principle that if you invest, especially in a long-term risky investment, if something comes out of it, you're supposed to get the profit. It doesn't happen in our system. The taxpayer paid for it and gets nothing - assumes all of the risk, gets zero. The money goes into the pockets of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who are ripping off decades of work in the public sector."
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"The costs of the Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion - a major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to bankrupt America by drawing it into a trap. The 2011 military budget - almost matching that of the rest of the world combined - is higher in real terms than at any time since World War II and is slated to go even higher ."
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"As far as Bernie Sanders is concerned, he is a decent, honest person, and I supported him. What he means by socialism is New Deal Liberalism. In fact, his actual policies would not have been a great surprise to General Eisenhower. The fact that this is called a "political revolution" is a sign of how far to the right the political spectrum has shifted, mainly in the last 30 years since the neoliberal programs began to be instituted. What he was calling for was a restoration of something like New Deal Liberalism, which is a very good thing."
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"There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them"
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"Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment."
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"When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people - along with despair about its future."
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"The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable - if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it."
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"That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything."
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"If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you're doing something wrong."
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"Power is concentrated. The general policy is exactly the way that Adam Smith described it: it's designed for the benefit of its principal architects, the powerful. It serves "the vile maxim of the masters: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else". Those are the basic rules of the world."
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"We're supposed to believe that oil had nothing to do with it, that if Iraq were exporting pickles or jelly and the center of world oil production were in the South Pacific that the United States would've liberated them anyway. It has nothing to do with the oil, what a crass idea. Anyone with their head screwed on knows that that can't be true."
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"It's necessary to address the concerns and beliefs of those who are taken in by the fraud, or who don't recognize the nature and significance of the issues for other reasons. If by philosophy we mean reasoned and thoughtful analysis, then it can address the moment, though not by confronting the "alternative facts" but by analyzing and clarifying what is at stake, whatever the issue is. Beyond that, what is needed is action: urgent and dedicated, in the many ways that are open to us."
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"Labor # Unions are the leading force for # democratization and # progress ."
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"There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known, it's called sugar. . . . The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans."
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"The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information."
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"There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do."
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"Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy."
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