More Quotes by Noam Chomsky
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.
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.
Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies.
Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.
If voting could actually change anything, it would be illegal.
That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.
Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.
Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy - their own population.
Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.
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.
