Thread by @TomLondon6

“The whole educational & professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on - because they're dysfunctional to the institutions”
- Noam Chomsky

“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....”
- Noam Chomsky

“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit”
- Noam Chomsky

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies”
- Noam Chomsky

“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines that everybody else is saying,... or else you say something which in fact is true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune”
- Noam Chomsky

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state”
- Noam Chomsky

“Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility"
- Noam Chomsky

"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”
- Noam Chomsky

“If you quietly accept & go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing & say another. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, selected for obedience"

“It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism”
- Noam Chomsky

“We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice”
- Noam Chomsky

“Hamas is described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, dedicated to destruction of Israel' [You never hear] 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a 2-state settlement in accord with international consensus' - blocked for over 30 years by US and Israel"
- Chomsky

“No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist" is to say, 'I'm a government propagandist”
- Chomsky

“The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself”
- Noam Chomsky

“Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one”
- Noam Chomsky