Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.
Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.
The ideal is to create a completely fragmented atomized society where everybody is totally alone, doing nothing but trying to pursue created wants, and the wants are created.
Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things. Noam Chomsky.
The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren’t being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.
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.
Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.
I didn’t pay my taxes for years.
Of course, everybody says they’re for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: What kind of peace?
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.
By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti.
I don’t say you’re self-censoring – I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying; but what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.
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.
Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.
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.
Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.
I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.
The childcare tax credit makes some sense.
If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.