“The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in their fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the educated classes, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit.” 

“Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost.” 

“Medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism.” 

“And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising principles, that lead us into revolutions?” 

“America, like a few other nations, has become characteristic for the depth of the abyss that divide a handful of brutal millionaires who are stagnating in a mire of luxury, and millions of laboring starving men and women who are always staring want in the face.” 

“Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as they make the workers pay” 

“Always turn a negative situation into a positive situation.”

“That is the nature of being well educated. It is to accept the framework of power and not question it.” 

“Management,” according to the neorealists, means maintaining the conflict as “a low intensity confrontation”—which means the loss of local, human lives, without any damage to the mediating superpower.” 

“Morris Halle was already working on a generative phonology of Russian in the 1950s, and we also worked together on the generative phonology of English, at first jointly with Fred Lukoff.” 

“stupid orders for years and years—that’s the way I did it, for example. Like, you’re told by some stupid teacher, “Do this,” which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you” 

“People are called intellectuals because they're privileged. It's not because they're smart or they know a lot. There are plenty of people who know more and are smarter but aren't intellectuals because they don't have the privilege. The people called intellectuals are privileged. They have resources and opportunities, and enough freedom has been won so that they state does not have an unrestrained capacity to repress” 

“We're taught to talk about the world as a world of as states conceived as unified, coherent entities. If you study international relations (IR) theory, there's what's called "realist" IR theory, which says there is an anarchic world of states and states pursue their "national interest." It's in large part mythology. There are a few common interests, like we don't want to be destroyed. But, for the most part, people within a nation have very different interests. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same.” 

“No, there is no real Left now. If you are just counting heads, there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they are atomized, committed to different special interests—gay rights, environmental rights, this, that. They don’t coalesce into a movement that can really do things.” 

“I don't have anything against bulldozers; I think they're great. It's a lot better than digging with a shovel.” 

“essential differences between generative grammar and structural linguistics.” 

“Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness” 

“at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to—rather than alleviate—material and cultural deficit. If” 

“Like, we can have big discussions about what society ought to look like in the future, which is fine, but that doesn't affect what happens to people in their lives right now, except extremely indirectly. What happens to people in their daily lives usually depends on small, difficult, tactical assessments about where to put your time and energy” 

“If you want to traumatize people, treason trials are an extreme way—if there are spies running around in our midst, then we’re really in trouble, we’d better just listen to the government and stop thinking.” 

“The invasion was undertaken with the expectation that it probably would increase the threat of terror. That was the advice given by the government’s own intelligence agencies and by others, by lots of specialists on terror, who said it was very likely to increase terror, for” 

“Tis to work and have such pay As just keeps life from day to day In your limbs, as in a cell For the tyrants’ use to dwell, … ’Tis to be slave in soul And to hold no strong control Over your own wills, but be All that others make of ye.” 

“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.” 

“The very concept of social planning, of rational planning for human concerns—that's regarded as virtually subversive. And that's the only thing that could possibly save people: rational social planning, carried out by accountable people representing the whole population rather than business elites. Democracy, in other words—that's a concept we don't have.”