To some degree it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.
Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?
There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.
The best defense against democracy is to distract people.
The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.
The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category – except for the category of familiarity.
Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.
The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
Capitalism’s concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is anti-human and intolerable in the deepest sense.
If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I’m a professor at MIT, that’s nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.
In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it’s low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift – a striking shift – from production to financialization.
Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.
It’s quite extraordinary to hear a supposedly learned person call the United States a leading terrorist nation, one of the leading terrorist nations in the world. It’s false and very treacherous teaching.
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.
If it’s wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.
People don’t talk to each other. You’re alone with your television set or internet. But you can’t have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call “secondary organizations,” places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don’t do it alone.
The government has a defect: it’s potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they’re pure tyrannies.