Noam Chomsky

If you want to achieve something, you build a structure. If you want to prevent something, you mess it up.

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

There are two problems for a society: to create wealth and to create justice. The second is more important.

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you're unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

The United States is a failed state. It's a failed state from many points of view, but it's a failed state in terms of its social policy.

Nobody is going to hand you anything. You have to organize for it.

If you are interested in the things that I am interested in, you don't need a university degree to pursue them.

Every person is a walking encyclopedia, and every person is a walking library.

The whole educational system is a very elaborate mechanism to train you to be obedient, to be docile, to do what you're told, to follow instructions.

It's a truism that almost any scientist will tell you: The more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know.

The very design of the corporate structure is to insulate power from any public control and to ensure that it is entirely in the hands of private tyrannies.

There are very few people who are going to make it through life without having some kind of interaction with the criminal justice system.

If you want to be a serious intellectual, you have to be able to deal with complexity.

The whole point of the corporate system is to get rid of independent thinking.

The two major political parties are basically two factions of the business party.

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people who are trying to make a living. They're committed by people who are trying to make a profit.

You can't have a functioning democracy if the public is excluded from participation in the major decisions that affect their lives.

The media are corporations, they have an interest in selling a product, and the product is the audience.

The whole concept of 'national interest' is a fraud. It's a concept that's used to justify the interests of the powerful.

It's very hard to predict the future, but one thing is clear: the future is going to be very different from the past.