Noam Chomsky is an American linguist and political commentator. Also a major figure in analytic philosophy who has authored over 100 books. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure and was voted the “world’s top public intellectual” in a 2005 poll.
1. If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
2. If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
3. The U.S. has always insisted on its right to use force, whatever international law requires, and whatever international institutions decide.… The U.S., of course, is not alone in these practices. Other states commonly act in much the same way, if not constrained by external or internal forces.
4. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.
5. The “corporatization of America” during the past century has been an attack on democracy—and on markets, part of the shift from something resembling “capitalism” to the highly administered markets of the modern state/corporate era.
6. If the principle is, “Let’s not get lethal substances out to the public”, the first one you’d go after is tobacco. The next one you’d go after is alcohol. Way down the list you’d get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you’d get to marijuana.
7. Robert McNamara in the late 1960s [said that] if you have really good management and everything’s under control and people are told what to do, under those conditions, man can maximize his potential. I just compared that with standard Leninist views on vanguard parties, which are about the same. About the only difference is that McNamara brought God in, and I suppose Lenin didn’t bring God in. He brought Marx in.
8. Right after September 11, the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, said the first thing that had to be done to combat terrorism was to pass fast-track. Now that should really make Osama bin Laden tremble in his boots - that the President has Kremlin-style authority to sign economic agreements.
9. I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.
10. Obama’s now conducting the world’s greatest international terrorist campaign – the drones and special forces campaign. It’s also a terror-generating campaign. The common understanding at the highest level [is] that these actions generate potential terrorists.