More Quotes by Noam Chomsky
The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.
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 - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. 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.
As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It's something you have to find out for yourself.
There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.
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.
Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy - their own population.
That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.
