As we [with Edward Herman] discuss there [in Manufacturing Consent] and elsewhere, recognition of the importance of "manufacturing consent" has become an ever more central theme in the more free societies.

A person who issues that charge that someone adheres to the principle "do as I say, not as I do" has three options: produce an example; withdraw the charge; take the coward's way out and slink away silently.

There's something deeply rooted in American culture. You can pretty much identify what it was. You take a look at the history. It was internal conquest. You had to defend yourself against what the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, an enlightened figure, called the attacks of the "merciless Indian savages," whose known way of warfare was torture and destruction. Also you had a slave population, you had to protect yourself against them. You needed guns.

When people know we are ready to use nuclear weapons, they're going to back off if we do something aggressive. So basically, nuclear weapons are always being used.

The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

If commissars in Soviet Russia agreed to subordinate themselves to state power, they could at least plead fear in extenuation. Their counterparts in more free and open societies can plead only cowardice.