More Quotes by Noam Chomsky
It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.
The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.
Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It's something you have to find out for yourself.
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.
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.
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 indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.
