Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928 - )

American linguist and political analyst

Sourced:

• "[In] Democratic societies ... the state can't control behavior by force. It can to some extent, but it's much more limited in its capacity to control by force. Therefore, it has to control what you think. ... One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there's a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, then you can have a debate."
  • Source: Chronicles of Dissent, Propaganda in the US vs in the USSR, October 24, 1986
• "The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus."
  • Source: Chronicles of Dissent, Non-Conspiracy Analysis of Propaganda System, October 24, 1986
• "The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly."
  • Source: Necessary Illusions, Chapter 1: Democracy and the Media, 1989
• "The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything... That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about."
  • Source: WBAI interview, January, 1992
• "To be an intellectual is a vocation for anybody: it means using your mind and applying it to issues of human significance. Some people are privileged, powerful and usually conformist enough that they can make their way into the public arena. That doesn't make them any more intellectual than a taxi driver who happens to be thinking about the same things and may be much smarter and much more understanding of them. It's a question of power."
  • Source: CommonSense interview, May 3, 2002
• "Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations."
  • Source: Telling the Truth about Imperialism, International Socialist Review, November-December, 2003