Noam Chomsky

In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

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.

You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

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.

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.'

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.

Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.

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.

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.

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.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.