Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.
To some degree it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – “indoctrination,” we might say – exercised through the mass media.
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.