The world is a very puzzling place. If you’re not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else’s mind.
It’s only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it’s not terrorism.
My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.
There are plenty of things that are unknown, but are assumed reasonably to exist, even in the most basic sciences. Maybe 90 percent of the mass-energy in the universe is called “dark,” because nobody knows what it is.
Don’t be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.
The whole educational and professional training system...
The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That’s never been impossible and never been easy.
These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.
The goal is a society in which the basic social unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.
The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. Straight-out war crime.
Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.
It doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.
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.
In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I’ve done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught.
As long as each individual is facing the television tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.
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.
A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.
I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.
Quite generally, international affairs have more than a slight resemblance to the Mafia. The Godfather does not take it lightly when he is crossed, even by a small storekeeper.