Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull.

It is only natural to expect that guilds will tend to "protect their turf" and to resist challenge.

Education is not just you learn how a mosquito flies in the rain, but you learn how to be creative and why it's exciting to learn things and create things and make up new things.

The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself.

If you look back to the anti-intervention movements, what were they? Let's take the Vietnam War - the biggest crime since the Second World War. You couldn't be opposed to the war for years. The mainstream liberal intellectuals were enthusiastically in support of the war. In Boston, a liberal city where I was, we literally couldn't have a public demonstration without it being violently broken up, with the liberal press applauding, until late 1966.

The book Manufacturing Consent, which I co-authored with Edward Herman, begins with a description of the structure and institutional setting of the commercial media, and then draws some rather simple-minded conclusions about what we would expect the media product to be, given these (not particularly controversial) conditions.

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it's been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it's over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas.