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Quotes About Control

But for another thing, there's no law of nature which says that control over capital has to be in a few hands?that's like saying that political power has to be in a few hands. Why? There wasn't a law that said that the king and the nobles had to run everything, and there isn't a law that says that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically, they can be changed historically
~ Noam Chomsky
the distinguished Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his text American Politics, observes that power must remain invisible if it is to be effective: "The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.
~ Noam Chomsky
Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time—it refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit.
~ Noam Chomsky
It's quite standard for those who hold the clubs to say: Forget about everything that happened and let's just go on from here. In other words, I've got what I want, and out forget about what your concerns are. I'll just take what I want.
~ Noam Chomsky
Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely.
~ Noam Chomsky
A democracy is a system in which you are free to do whatever you like as long as you do what we tell you.
~ Noam Chomsky
What we have to do is trap them into consumerism. Carry out enough propaganda and teasers and so on to make freed slaves feel they've got to have these commodities. They go to the company store and they get them, they're in debt, and pretty soon they're trapped—the slave economy's back.
~ Noam Chomsky
The tendency in K–12 is reducing education to mechanical skills, and undermining creativity and independence—both on the part of teachers and students. That's what "teaching to the test" is, "No Child Left Behind," "Race to the Top." I think these should be regarded as methods of indoctrination and control. Of course, one of the other ways to do that has been to simply reduce or eliminate free education.
~ Noam Chomsky
Beware of the people of power, and avarice, and wealth. Because the more intelligent they are, the better they'll be at distorting reality and convincing us that what's good for them is good for the world when it's just the opposite.
~ Noam Chomsky
Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, which was efficient but also a highly controlling device. There was a problem with the assembly line. It's so onerous that people dropped out. They couldn't stand it. They had to hire almost a thousand workers to see if they could get one hundred to stay on.
~ Noam Chomsky
If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"—but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice—it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.
~ Noam Chomsky
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." ? Noam Chomsky
~ Noam Chomsky
Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based mandarin class, remain in power no matter whom you elect.
~ Noam Chomsky
El poder es siempre ilegítimo, hasta que demuestre lo contrario.
~ Noam Chomsky
See, one of the serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of the whole system of indoctrination, is the idea that the government is the power?and the government's not the power, the government is one segment of power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the state-managers are usually just servants.
~ Noam Chomsky
Yes, it's simple, really. If you're riding a bicycle and you don't want to fall off, you have to keep going - fast.
~ Noam Chomsky
It is rather striking to observe that the policies that the rich and powerful adopt for themselves are the precise opposite of those they dictate to the weak and poor.
~ Noam Chomsky
At Harvard they teach people how to rule the world and at MIT they teach them how to make the world work. This is for the elite schools. For the rest, turn them into servants.
~ Noam Chomsky
I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system. State censorship is not necessary, or even very efficient, in comparison to the ideological controls exercised by systems that are more complex and more decentralized.
~ Noam Chomsky
You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.
~ Noam Chomsky
Any dictator would admire the obedience and uniformity of the U.S media.
~ Noam Chomsky
Well, we happen to have a huge rabid raccoon running around—it's called corporations. And there is nothing in the society right now that can protect people from that tyranny, except the federal government. Now, it doesn't protect them very well, because mostly it's run by the corporations, but still it does have some limited effect—it can enforce regulatory measures
~ Noam Chomsky
The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity of these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from the general population and to persuade them of their incapacity to organize their own affairs or to understand the social world in which they live without the tutelage of intermediaries.
~ Noam Chomsky
The enormous public relations industry, from its Origins early in this Century, has been dedicated to the control of the public mind as Business Leaders described the task and they acted on their words, surely one of the central themes of modern history. The fact that the public relations industry has its roots and major centers in the country that is most free is exactly which we should expect, with a proper understanding of Humes Maxim.
~ Noam Chomsky