Noam Chomsky

"Two days after the Boston marathon bombings, there was a drone strike in Yemen attacking a peaceful village, which killed a target who could very easily have been apprehended. But, of course, it is just easier to terrorise people. The drones are a terrorist weapon; they not only kill targets but also terrorise other people." Noam Chomsky

"China is a great manufacturing center, but it's actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial - more advanced industrial centers - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe - and it basically assembles them." Noam Chomsky

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Noam Chomsky

"The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can't be intimidated. Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why - they've been around for 4,000 years, they have contempt for the barbarians, they just don't give a damn." Noam Chomsky

"That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital." Noam Chomsky

"A tremendous amount of the entrepreneurial initiative, if you want to call it that, comes from the dynamic state sector on which most of the economy relies to socialize costs and risks and privatize eventual profit. And that's achieved by, if you like, advertising." Noam Chomsky

"The many questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - meaning primarily the United States - come down to two fundamental issues: 'What are the accepted and applicable 'rules of world order,' and how do these apply in the case of Kosovo?'" Noam Chomsky

"I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system." Noam Chomsky

"People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That's because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning." Noam Chomsky

"It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar." Noam Chomsky

"Cuba has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since 1959, Cuba has been under attack from the hemispheric superpower." Noam Chomsky

"When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles." Noam Chomsky

"The Federal Reserve has an official commitment to two different policies. One is to prevent inflation from getting too high. The second is to maintain high employment... the European Central Bank has only the first. It has no commitment to keep employment up." Noam Chomsky

"In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America." Noam Chomsky