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Noam Chomsky [1928-0] American

Rank: 4
Activist, Linguist

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist.

War, History, Society, Politics, Business, Freedom, Intelligence, Science, Technology, Education, Environmental, Government, Hope, Independence, Respect, Travel, Alone, Amazing, Anger, Best, Car, Chance, Communication, Computers, Courage, Death, Design, Fear, Future, Home, Imagination, Leadership, Learning, Money, Nature, Peace, Positive, Power, Teacher, Truth

Quote	Tags	Rank
The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.	Computers, Education, Positive, Society	101
If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.	Amazing	102
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.		103
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.		104
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.		105
The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.	Fear	106
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.		107
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.		108
NATO was constructed on the - with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?		109
Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.		110
The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.		111
Reviewing the record of American intervention in Indochina in the Pentagon Papers, one cannot fail to be struck by the continuity of basic assumptions from one administration to the next. Never has there been the slightest deviation from the principle that a noncommunist regime must be imposed and defended, regardless of popular sentiment.		112
The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination', we might say - exercised through the mass media.		113
Two days after the Boston marathon bombings, there was a drone strike in Yemen attacking a peaceful village, which killed a target who could very easily have been apprehended. But, of course, it is just easier to terrorise people. The drones are a terrorist weapon; they not only kill targets but also terrorise other people.		114
American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster.		115
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.	Freedom, Politics	116
I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.		117
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.		118
Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.	Best, Education	119
It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.		120
If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.		121
The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!	Communication	122
Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.	War	123
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.		124
If you're in favour of any policy - reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever - if you're at least minimally moral, it's because you think it's somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.	Nature	125
I like Gramsci. He's an important person.		126
My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha'am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha'am's essays.		201
One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics, as he calls it - very outstanding political economist - which essentially - I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.	Politics	202
The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa's major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.	Hope	203
In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers, but not against the United States.		204
A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.	War	205
By curious accident of history and geography, the world's major energy resources are located pretty much in Shiite regions. They're a minority in the Middle East, but they happen to be where the oil is, right around the northern part of the Gulf.	History	206
There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders.	Death, War	207
I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.		208
Nicaragua dealt with the problem of terrorism in exactly the right way. It followed international law and treaty obligations. It collected evidence, brought the evidence to the highest existing tribunal, the International Court of Justice, and received a verdict - which, of course, the U.S. dismissed with contempt.		209
Immediately after 11 September, the U.S. closed down the Somali charitable network Al-Barakaat on grounds that it was financing terror. This achievement was hailed one of the great successes of the 'war on terror.' In contrast, Washington's withdrawal of its charges as without merit a year later aroused little notice.	War	210
History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.	History	211
Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.	Hope, Money, Politics	212
American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.		213
In September 1993, President Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn - the climax of a 'day of awe,' as the press described it.		214
My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression - thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.		215
Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.		216
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.		217
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.	Power	218
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.		219
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.		220
In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.	Freedom, Society	221
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia - that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.	Alone	222
Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.		223
As international support for Obama's decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world.	Government, War	224
Even in the 1950s, President Eisenhower was concerned about what he called a campaign of hatred of the U.S. in the Arab world, because of the perception on the Arab street that it supported harsh and oppressive regimes to take their oil.		225
It is easy to dismiss the world as 'irrelevant,' or consumed by 'paranoid anti-Americanism,' but perhaps not wise.		226
Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.		301
The Oslo Accords in 1993 determined that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are a single territorial entity which cannot be divided. Immediately, the United States and Israel set about separating the two and making sure that they would not be united.		302
I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. 'Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won't? How do I know there's anything there except what I'm conscious of?'		303
Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.	History, Society, War	304
China is a great manufacturing center, but it's actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial - more advanced industrial centers - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe - and it basically assembles them.	Technology	305
Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that's so deep in history that there's no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.	History	306
The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics - greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.		307
Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.		308
International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn't pay his protection money. You have to have obedience; otherwise, the idea can spread that you don't have to listen to the orders, and it can spread to important places.		309
There's plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can't duplicate that on blogs.		310
Undoubtedly, the U.S. harbors leading international terrorists, people described by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department as leading terrorists, like Orlando Bosch, now Posada Carriles, not to speak of those who actually implement state terrorism.		311
What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.	Courage, Truth	312
When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn't producing any more.		313
The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism - mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn't deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets.		314
It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.	War	315
Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.	Home	316
The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.	History	317
When a politician uses the word 'folks,' we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.		318
A large majority of Americans believe that the U.N., not the U.S., should take the lead in working with Iraqis to transfer authentic sovereignty as well as in economic reconstruction and maintaining civic order.		319
Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It's a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can't get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt, it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy.	Business	320
There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.		321
Thanh Hoa itself is a rich agricultural province. Rice fields, a pattern of many shades of green, stretch far into the distance along the road, which also winds through foothills and the fringes of heavy jungle where tigers are said to roam. The vegetation, wild or cultivated, is lush.		322
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.	Future	323
Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.	Society	324
In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them.	Science, Society	325
Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.		326
I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.	History	401
With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.		402
We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.	War	403
Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.		404
I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.		405
As far as U.S. intelligence knows, Iran is developing nuclear capacities, but they don't know if they are trying to develop nuclear weapons or not. Chances are they're developing what's called 'nuclear capability,' which many states have. That is the ability to have nuclear weapons if they decide to do it. That's not a crime.	Intelligence	406
I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven - that's none of my business, ultimately. I won't lecture her on the philosophy of science.	Business, Science	407
Unlike Iran, Israel refuses to allow inspections at all, refuses to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has hundreds of nuclear weapons, has advanced delivery systems.		408
In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.	Respect	409
The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.		410
The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.	Leadership, War	411
Everyone who is critical of Israeli policy is deluged by crazed messages intended to flood their email system or, more insidiously, passwords are accessed and messages sent out under their name! I'm sure it's illegal. It's also an effort to undermine free speech.		412
As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states - no more, no less.		413
A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it, too. But the government won't allow it.	Business, Government	414
In November 2004, U.S. occupation forces launched their second major attack on the city of Falluja. The press reported major war crimes instantly, with approval.	War	415
The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.		416
Stability is when the U.K. and U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.		417
Turkey must find its place if, of course, it can heal its internal sores, and none is more malignant than the perennial Kurdish issue.		418
In November 2008, the day of the presidential election, Israeli military forces invaded Gaza and killed half a dozen Hamas militants. Well, that was followed by a missile exchange for a couple of weeks in both directions.		419
You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India.		420
The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.		421
The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials - literally, which is why I'm teaching at MIT.		422
Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.		423
All through Latin America, there's sharp condemnation of the criminal atrocities of Sept. 11. But it's qualified by the observation that although these are horrible atrocities, they are not unfamiliar.		424
It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we've seen with the Internet's development.		425
The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.		426
It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.		501
The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.	Chance	502
Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by 'sophisticated' methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.		503
Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.		504
It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.		505
On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.		506
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.		507
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.		508
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.	Imagination	509
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.	Freedom	510
In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.		511
Governments don't control people like they used to.		512
Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.		513
If you don't like what someone has to say, argue with them.		514
When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.		515
For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.	Independence	516
The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.		517
The 'anti-globalisation movement' is the most significant proponent of globalisation - but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.		518
In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.		519
I haven't read Horowitz. I didn't used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don't read him today.		520
Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.		521
Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free.		522
In Egypt, on the eve of Tahrir Square, there was a major poll which found that overwhelmingly - 80-90%, numbers like that - Egyptians regarded the main threats they face as the U.S. and Israel. They don't like Iran - Arabs generally don't like Iran - but they didn't consider it a threat.		523
I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system.		524
The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.		525
When you look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery, for example, or other forms of tyranny, are inherently monstrous. The individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you can imagine.		526
I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.		601
Dissident intellectuals aren't all beautiful.		602
People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You're a traitor.		603
Latin America has much richer resources. You'd expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.		604
The U.S. has the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world, has about twice the per capita costs, and some of the worst outcomes. It's also the only privatized system.		605
The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.		606
There's very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfaction - that is, the hatred and the anger - they come from acceptance of American values, not a rejection of them, and recognition that they're rejected by the U.S. government and by U.S. elites, which does lead to hatred and anger.	Anger	607
There's a lot of fuss on the Left about election irregularities, like, you know, the voting machines were tampered with, they didn't count the votes right, and so on. That's all accurate and of some importance, but of far more importance is the fact that elections just don't take place, not in any meaningful sense of the term 'election.'		608
Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.		609
The United States is a violent military state. It's been involved in military action all over the place.		610
The list of U.S. vetoes at the Security Council to protect Israeli aggression and occupation is huge.		611
The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it's a major problem, that's just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it.		612
No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.	Science	613
To say that the United States has pursued diplomacy with North Korea is a little bit misleading. It did under the Clinton administration, though neither side completely lived up to their obligations. Clinton didn't do what was promised, nor did North Korea, but they were making progress.		614
Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.		615
A tremendous amount of the entrepreneurial initiative, if you want to call it that, comes from the dynamic state sector on which most of the economy relies to socialize costs and risks and privatize eventual profit. And that's achieved by, if you like, advertising.		616
Civil disobedience's main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.		617
If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.		618
I've been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan's vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.		619
In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it.	Technology	620
I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.		621
The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy's finest hour.		622
Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.		623
Iran has little capacity to deploy force. Its strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to set it.		624
Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated - Japan's attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.		625
Reparations - not just aid - should be provided by those responsible for devastating Iraqi civilian society by cruel sanctions and military actions, and - together with other criminal states - for supporting Saddam Hussein through his worst atrocities and beyond. That is the minimum that honesty requires.		626
Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn't have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.		701
Some international law specialists compare the invasion of Iraq to the 'crimes against the peace' for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg.	Peace	702
For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.		703
In ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.		704
As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.		705
There is no plausible theory under which the record of the Pentagon Papers can be interpreted as relating to the national defense.		706
Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: 'What is the scientific status of the claims?' 'What social or ideological needs do they serve?'		707
Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first place.		708
To summarize, draft resistance can make use of the inegalitarian nature of American society as a technique for increasing the cost of American aggression, and it threatens values that are important to those in a decision-making position.		709
After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the 'sense of utter irresponsibility' shown by the demonstrators.		710
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.		711
The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.		712
Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.		713
The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.		714
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.		715
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.		716
I don't have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.		717
If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.	Teacher	718
Concentration of executive power, unless it's very temporary and for specific circumstances, let's say fighting world war two, it's an assault on democracy.		719
Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.		720
As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.		721
There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.	Environmental	722
Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.		723
I'm about as monolingual as you come, but nevertheless, I have a variety of different languages at my command, different styles, different ways of talking, which do involve different parameter settings.		724
Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information. You expect to see delusion and imagery.		725
It could be - and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don't like it - that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.		726
Pakistan is not a unified country.		801
You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.	Learning	802
Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.		803
Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.		804
Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.		805
I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can't explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?		806
I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don't know how much experience you've had with contemporary Hebrew. It's quite difficult.		807
There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.		808
Governments are supposed to lie to their citizens.		809
There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.		810
The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.		811
The 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws.		812
The close Turkish-Israeli relations go back to the late 1950s - military intelligence, commercial, more recently, tourism and cultural relations.	Intelligence	813
Social Security is based on a principle. It's based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat.		814
My family was mostly unemployed working class.		815
Civil disobedience is - it's no fun.		816
I don't think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.		817
The U.S. is off the spectrum in religious commitment.		818
The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues, and that's not their concern.		819
Unlike Europe, China can't be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they've been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don't see any need to.		820
The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers.		821
Fidel Castro, whatever people may think of him, is a hero in Latin America, primarily because he stood up to the United States.		822
Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.		823
When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.		824
In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress 'suspects.'	Respect	825
Well before September 11, it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.	Technology	826
The many questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - meaning primarily the United States - come down to two fundamental issues: 'What are the accepted and applicable 'rules of world order,' and how do these apply in the case of Kosovo?'		901
Under Clinton, the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts.		902
If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in U.S. industry, even more than elsewhere, there's layer after layer of management - a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities.		903
One of the most interesting reactions to come out of 1968 was in the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which believed there was a 'crisis of democracy' from too much participation of the masses.		904
The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.		905
The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.		906
The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.	Politics	907
The Great Seal was an early proclamation of 'humanitarian intervention,' to use the currently fashionable phrase.		908
There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information - the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.		909
Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.		910
Even the most cynical can hardly be surprised by the antics of Nixon and his accomplices as they are gradually revealed. It matters little, at this point, where the exact truth lies in the maze of perjury, evasion, and of contempt for the normal - hardly inspiring - standards of political conduct.		911
From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.		912
It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.		913
As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.		914
The 'peace movement' exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.		915
I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.		916
I don't see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that's almost inconceivable.		917
You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.		918
The Federal Reserve has an official commitment to two different policies. One is to prevent inflation from getting too high. The second is to maintain high employment... the European Central Bank has only the first. It has no commitment to keep employment up.		919
The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.		920
Israel is following policies which maximise its security threats... policies which choose expansion over security... policies which lead to their moral degradation, their isolation, their delegitimation, as they call it now, and very likely ultimate destruction. That's not impossible.		921
If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be... a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.		922
Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.		923
Guantanamo is still open, but it's unlikely that serious torture is going on at Guantanamo. There is just too much inspection.		924
I don't think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state.		925
Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.		926
Obama's primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.		1001
A siege is an act of war.		1002
There are nuclear-weapons-free zones in several parts of the world already, except that they're not implemented fully, because the U.S. won't allow it.		1003
The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.		1004
The country that consistently ranks among the highest in educational achievement is Finland. A rich country, but education is free. Germany, education is free. France, education is free.		1005
In Latin America, specialists and polling organisations have, for some time, observed that the extension of formal democracy was accompanied by an increasing disillusionment about democracy and a lack of faith in democratic institutions.		1006
The term 'globalisation' is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests.		1007
Today, we have private airline companies, but if you take a look at a Boeing plane next time you travel, you'll see that you are basically taking a ride on a modified bomber.	Travel	1008
There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.		1009
I don't usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this 'hopey changey stuff,' she was right: there was nothing there.		1010
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.		1011
How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.		1012
I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.	Car	1013
In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.		1014
Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.		1015
Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.		1016
Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.		1017
There are massive efforts on the part of the internet's corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.		1018
When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.		1019
State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.		1020
In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom - along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.		1021
In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.		1022
My proposal happens to be very mainstream.		1023
When I look at public opinion, I'm not far out of the mainstream. I'm in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I've ever said.		1024
If you're working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.		1025
It is pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advanced' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.		1026
Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.		1101
If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.		1102
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.		1103
Meteorologists are pretty faces reading scripts telling you whether it's going to rain tomorrow.		1104
There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn't work like that... There's a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.		1105
Why should Iran have a deterrent strategy? Well, it's surrounded by hostile enemies. Both of its borders have been under occupation by a hostile superpower, the United States, which is constantly violating the U.N. charter by leaving open what they call the saying, 'all options are open' - meaning the threat of war.		1106
The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.		1107
When secular figures are turned into divinities, they way they are in Peian Yang or Stanford University - that I don't like.		1108
In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.		1109
From the U.S. point of view, negotiations are, in effect, a way for Israel to continue its policies of systematically taking over whatever it wants in the West Bank, maintaining the brutal siege on Gaza, separating Gaza from the West Bank and, of course, occupying the Syrian Golan heights, all with full U.S. support.		1110
In a democracy, in a functioning democracy, what would be happening is that popular organizations, unions, political groupings, others would be developing their programs, putting them forth, insisting that their representatives implement those programs.		1111
A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it's a well run institution - say, Goldman Sachs - it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.		1112
In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It's hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce.		1113
There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office - anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal.		1114
There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the U.S. simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land mines.		1115
Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's free market enthusiasms.		1116
In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti - France and the United States - combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The U.S. denies him permission to return to the entire region.		1117
If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.		1118
France had a policy, initiated by General de Gaulle, of trying to turn Europe into what was then called a 'third force,' independent of the two superpowers, so Europe should pursue an independent course.		1119
Sometimes I lose my temper.		1120
The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it's likely to harm them.		1121
In 1963, the U.N. Security Council declared a voluntary arms embargo on South Africa. That was extended to a mandatory embargo in 1977. And that was followed by economic sanctions and other measures - sometimes officials, countries, cities, towns - some organized by popular movements.		1122
After my first year of college, each course I took in every field was so boring that I didn't even go to the classes.		1123
Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don't just succumb.		1124
The Occupy movement is - it was a big surprise.		1125
WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for - presidential medal of honor.		1126
The U.S. and its allies will do anything they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world.		1201
Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.		1202
Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.		1203
If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.		1204
One of the problems of organizing in the North, in the rich countries, is that people tend to think - even the activists - that instant gratification is required. You constantly hear: 'Look I went to a demonstration, and we didn't stop the war so what's the use of doing it again?'		1205
If you want to achieve something, you build the basis for it.		1206
Cuba has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since 1959, Cuba has been under attack from the hemispheric superpower.		1207
Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.		1208
The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.		1209
The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.		1210
Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.		1211
When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won't tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, 'Well, you know: It's secret.'	Intelligence	1212
Remember, weapons of mass destruction don't mean missiles.		1213
Israelis would mostly breathe a sigh of relief if Palestinians were to disappear.		1214
Over the years, there have been a series of concepts developed to justify the use of force in international affairs for a long period. It was possible to justify it on the pretext, which usually turned out to have very little substance, that the U.S. was defending itself against the communist menace. By the 1980s, that was wearing pretty thin.		1215
John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.		1216
The western mantra is that Israel seeks negotiations without preconditions, while the Palestinians refuse. The opposite is more accurate.		1217
In 1949, China declared independence - an event known in Western discourse as 'the loss of China' in the U.S. - with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss.	Independence	1218
From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing.		1219
In November 2007, the White House issued a Declaration of Principles demanding that U.S. forces must remain indefinitely in Iraq and committing Iraq to privilege American investors.		1220
After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organised a People's Summit with 35,000 participants from 140 countries - not just representatives of governments, but also civil society and activists.		1221
Occupying armies have responsibilities, not rights. Their primary responsibility is to withdraw as quickly and expeditiously as possible, in a manner determined by the occupied population.		1222
September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That's all to the good.		1223
Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.		1224
In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.		1225
By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.		1226
If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health.		1301
In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students.		1302
The target of preventive war must have several characteristics. It must be virtually defenceless; it must be important enough to be worth the trouble; it must be possible to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.		1303
U.S. Government propaganda tries to give the impression that aerial bombardment achieves near-surgical accuracy, so that military targets can be destroyed with minimal effect on civilians. Technical documents give a different picture.		1304
Part of the population of Laos lives in urban centers, Vientiane being the largest.		1305
Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.		1306
The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with jihadi terrorism.		1307
The U.S. is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis.		1308
The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.		1309
In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!		1310
Somebody will be able to overcome any encryption technique you use!		1311
If you destroyed half the pharmaceutical production in the United States, we'd think it's a pretty serious problem. In fact, we'd probably go to war.		1312
Qatar-based 'Al-Jazeera,' the most important news channel in the Arab world, was harshly criticized by high U.S. officials for having 'emphasized civilian casualties' during the destruction of Falluja. The problem of independent media was later resolved when the channel was kicked out of Iraq in preparation for free elections.		1313
Spaniards were condemned for appeasing terrorism by voting for withdrawing troops from Iraq in the absence of U.N. authorization - that is, for taking a stand rather like that of 70 percent of Americans, who called for the U.N. to take the leading role in Iraq.		1314
The government argues that First Amendment rights are outweighed by the need to prosecute those who transmit classified information and documents.		1315
The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.		1316
The whole infrastructure of air travel was, and is, part of government policy. It is not a natural development of a free economic system - at least not in the way that is claimed. The same is true of the roads, of course.	Travel	1317
Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.		1318
Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use - a cynic might say that this is why they continue to exist.		1319
I would feel no hesitation in saying that it is the responsibility of a decent human being to give assistance to a child who is being attacked by a rabid dog, but I would not intend this to imply that in all imaginable circumstances one must, necessarily, act in accordance with this general responsibility.		1320
A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.		1321
The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.		1322
To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.		1323
I don't like the intellectual label.		1324
Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.		1325
I don't want followers.		1326
States are not moral agents.		1401
Anti-Americanism is a pure totalitarian concept. The very notion is idiotic.		1402
I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn't picked me up.		1403
I would appear on Fox News more easily than I would NPR.		1404
If you do a Google search, you will probably read a lot of stuff about how I am someone who wants to kill all the Jews and hates the United States.		1405
The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.		1406
It's dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.		1407
Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes... to an extent, that's true elsewhere, including the United States, but it's been pretty extreme in Greece.		1408
As for my own views, they've of course evolved over the years. This conception of 'renouncing beliefs' is very odd, as if we're in some kind of religious cult. I 'renounce beliefs' practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.		1409
If you could take a subway from the suburbs in Boston, where I live, to downtown in 10 minutes, that improves your life over sitting in a traffic jam. People should see that.		1410
In the case of the environment, there's no one to bail it out.		1411
I know some really outstanding Turkish journalists, and have been pleased and honored to be able to join with them a few times in their courageous protests against state terror and repression.		1412
On the Internet, you think everything is going to be public.		1413
Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.		1414
Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing.		1415
I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors.		1416
I don't pay a lot of attention to polls.		1417
Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s - the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.		1418
The Republican Party has become overwhelmingly so extreme that it's hardly a traditional political party anymore.		1419
In 1979, Iranians carried out an illegitimate act: They overthrew a tyrant that the United States had imposed and supported, and moved on an independent path, not following U.S. orders.		1420
Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.		1421
As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.		1422
Israel is a pretty crazy state.		1423
If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself.		1424
The childcare tax credit makes some sense.		1425
It's a good idea to revitalize community colleges, to cut back, to modify the student loan program so it doesn't go through banks.		1426
In every country except - industrial country except the United States, the government uses its massive purchasing power to negotiate drug prices. That's one of the reasons prices are so much higher in the United States than in other countries.		1501
NATO's essentially run by the United States.		1502
Obama did organize a great large number of people and many enthusiastic people, what's called in the press 'Obama's Army.' But the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, to introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That's critical.		1503
In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.		1504
The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.		1505
You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.		1506
The U.S. - the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that's hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.		1507
I don't see anything that's come out on WikiLeaks that was a legitimate secret.		1508
What's important in Libya is, first of all, it has a good deal of oil. A lot of the country is unexplored; there may be a lot more. And it's very high-quality oil, so very valuable.		1509
By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti.		1510
There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that's been going on since the Second World War.		1511
When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.		1512
The doctrine that everything is fine as long as the population is quiet, that applies in the Middle East, applies in Central America, it applies in the United States.		1513
Egypt is the second-largest recipient over a long period of U.S. military and economic aid. Israel is first.		1514
Obama himself has been highly supportive of Mubarak.		1515
The Tea Party movement itself is maybe 15, 20 percent of the electorate. It's relatively affluent, white, nativist. You know, it has rather traditional nativist streaks to it. But what is much more important, I think, is the - is its outrage.		1516
I have been - I have spoken in Bir Zeit a number of times.		1517
In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, '69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it's worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started - an outright war started in 1962.		1518
Terrorists regard themselves as a vanguard. They're trying to mobilize others to their cause. I mean, every specialist on terrorism knows that.		1519
I have never really thought that the Left was much in 'array' as far as political purposes were concerned.		1520
Control is the source of strategic power.		1521
Right after 9-11, as far as I know, one newspaper in the United States had the integrity to investigate opinion in the Muslim world: the 'Wall Street Journal.'		1522
The public is strongly in favor of the Kyoto Protocols, so strongly in favor that a majority of Bush voters thought that he was in favor of it. They are simply unaware.		1523
If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.		1524
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the U.N. vetoed several resolutions right away, calling for an end to the fighting and so on, and that was a hideous invasion.		1525
Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.		1526
My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.		1601
Chinese military spending is carefully monitored by the United States.		1602
In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.		1603
Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act.		1604
Popular struggles to bring about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though there is a long way to go, and there is often regression.		1605
In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.		1606
If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions.		1607
There is every likelihood that the Jihadi movement, much of it highly critical of bin Laden, could have been split and undermined after 9/11.		1608
For many of the world's conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement.		1609
Perhaps the most striking assault on the foundations of traditional liberties is a little-known case brought to the Supreme Court by the Obama administration, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.		1610
The prescription for endless war poses a far greater danger to Americans than perceived enemies do, for reasons the terrorist organisations understand very well.		1611
The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.	Design	1612
In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.		1613
Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.		1614
Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.		1615
Mr. Mijanovi and those associated with him are the hope and the conscience of the Yugoslav revolution.		1616
The American claim that the bombing of North Vietnam was directed against military targets does not withstand direct investigation.		1617
The Vietnamese see their history as an unending series of struggles of resistance to aggression, by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the French, and now the Americans.		1618
There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication.		1619
I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organisational function - that's important, and fine, and I support it.		1620
There was unprecedented elite condemnation of the plans to invade Iraq. Sensible analysts were able to perceive that the enterprise carried significant risks for U.S. interests, however conceived.		1621
The call for debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away.		1622
The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.		1623
Occasionally the conflict between 'what we stand for' and 'what we do' has been forthrightly addressed.		1624
The appropriate response to terrorist crimes is police work, which has been successful worldwide.		1625
Violence can succeed, as Americans know well from the conquest of the national territory. But at terrible cost. It can also provoke violence in response, and often does.		1626
U.S. analysts estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted reaction to the Bush administration's militancy and aggressiveness.		1701
The U.S. has strategic and economic interests in Southeast Asia that must be secured. Holding Indochina is essential to securing these interests. Therefore, we must hold Indochina.		1702
An individual's refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.		1703
Science, as everyone knows, is responsible, moderate, unsentimental, and otherwise good.		1704
The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.		1705
Sooner or later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous.		1706
The government of Israel doesn't like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world.		1707
The U.N. charter bars the threat of force.		1708
In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It's not like Egypt, where you're going to get murdered by the security forces.		1709
Obama's policies have been approximately the same as Bush's, though there have been some slight differences, but that's not a great surprise. The Democrats supported Bush's policies.		1710
The U.S. is just in a class by itself in military expenses. It basically matches the rest of the world, and it's far more advanced.		1711
Obama, of course, outspent McCain.		1712
By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.		1713
Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It's minuscule, few percent.		1714
The invasion of Iraq, particularly, gave a big shot in the arm to the jihadi extremists.		1715
Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs - hadn't been done for a long time, and it's illegal in most countries - in the air controller strike.		1716
Government actually grew during the Reagan years.		1717
I didn't pay my taxes for years.		1718
Clinton himself acted in ways which increased the threat of terror.		1719
Armed attack has a definition in international law. It means sudden, overwhelming, instantaneous ongoing attack.		1720
It makes sense for Japan to pursue a more independent role in the world, following Latin America and others in freeing itself from U.S. domination.		1721
The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as 'failed states.'		1722
In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.		1723
In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev's willingness to accept Kennedy's hegemonic demands.		1724
The first scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone. It was not an easy task. There was no good text available.		1725
People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That's because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning.		1726
Palestinians have no wealth or power.		1801
A number of analysts have observed that although bin Laden was finally killed, he won some major successes in his war against the U.S.		1802
Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today's political scene.	Environmental	1803
Colombia has been the leading western recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence has grown through the '90s.		1804
Is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of the U.S.?		1805
It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.		1806
Pre-emptive war might fall within the framework of international law.		1807
It doesn't take long to become aware of the presence of the CIA in Laos.		1808
The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital - in some cases, overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations.		1809
The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.		1810
The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.		1811

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