The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many Quotes

“Powerless people who are being led to slaughter can’t do anything. Therefore it’s up to others to prevent them from being massacred. (53)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“Israel wanted to destroy the PLO because it was secular and nationalist, and was calling for negotiations and a diplomatic settlement. That was the threat, not the terrorists. (47)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“It’s probably in our nature to find a way to recast anything that we do in some way that makes it possible for us to live with it. (73)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“Just as women could pass through the “glass ceiling” and that wouldn’t change the political economy at all.
That’s one of the reasons why you commonly find the business sector reasonably willing to support efforts to overcome racism and sexism. It doesn’t matter that much for them. You lose a little white-male privilege in the executive suite, but that’s not all that important as long as the basic institutions of power and domination survive intact. (71)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“The elite are the masters, and they follow what he called their “vile maxim” — namely, “All for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.” (70)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“Some Marxists say racism is a product of the economic system, of capitalism. Would you accept that?
No. It has to do with conquest, with oppression. If you’re robbing somebody, oppressing them, dictating their lives, it’s a very rare person who can say: “Look, I’m a monster. I’m doing this for my own good.” Even Himmler didn’t say that.
A standard technique of belief formation goes along with oppression, whether it’s throwing them in gas chambers or charging them too much at a corner store, or anything in between. The standard reaction is to say: “It’s their depravity. That’s why I’m doing it. Maybe I’m even doing them good.”
If it’s their depravity, there’s got to be something different about them that makes them different from me. What’s different about them will be whatever you can find. (65)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“When you have your boot on someone’s neck, you have to justify it. The justification has to be their depravity. (64)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“The one part of the Third World that wasn’t colonized is the one part that’s part of the industrialized world. That’s not by accident. (60)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“That’s the traditional pattern. Invaders quite typically use collaborators to run things for them. They very naturally play upon any existing rivalries and hostilities to get one group to work for them against others. (58)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“In 1944, Nehru wrote an interesting book [The Discovery of India] from a British prison. He pointed out that if you trace British influence and control in each region of India, and then compare that with the level of poverty in the region, they correlate. The longer the British have been in a region, the poorer it is. (56)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“The Labor-based defense force Haganah had torture chambers and assassins. I once looked up their first recorded assassination in the official Haganah history. It’s described there straight. It was in 1921. A Dutch Jew named Jacob de Haan had to be killed, because he was trying to approach local Palestinians to see if things could be worked out between them and the new Jewish settlers. His murderer was assumed to be the woman who later became the wife of the first president of Israel. They said that another reason for assassinating him was that he was a homosexual. (51)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“It’s perfectly true that Israel wants peace. So did Hitler. Everybody wants peace. The question is, on what terms? (49)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“Israel deported virtually the whole faculty of one Islamic university. They essentially deported the intellectuals, people involved in welfare programs and so on. (46)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“We know what happened after Israel invaded Lebanon. They were driven out by what they call “terrorism” — meaning resistance by people who weren’t going to be cowed. (44)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“When Israel invaded in 1982, there’d been a lot of recent violence across the border, all from Israel north. There had been an American-brokered cease-fire which the PLO had held to scrupulously, initiating no cross-border actions. But Israel carried out thousands of provocative actions, including bombing of civilian targets all to try to get the PLO to do something, thus giving Israel an excuse to invade. (44)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“I remember talking to Mona Rishmawi, a lawyer for the human rights organization Al Haq in Ramallah on the West Bank. She told me that when she would go to court, she wouldn’t know whether the Israeli prosecutor would prosecute her clients under British mandate emergency law, Jordanian law, Israeli law or Ottoman law. Or their own laws. There are administrative regulations, some of which are never published. As any Palestinian lawyer will tell you, the legal system in the territories is a joke. There’s no law — just pure authority. (42)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“The US never gets condemned by a Security Council resolution, because it vetoes them. Take the invasion of Panama. There were two resolutions in the Security Council condemning the United States for that invasion. We vetoed them both. (42)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“Israel has always hoped that in the long run they would be able to expel much of the Palestinian population. (40)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“The Labor Advisory Committee was notified in mid-August 1992 that their report was due on September 9, 1992. However, they weren’t given a text of the agreement until about 24 hours before the report was due. That meant they couldn’t even convene, and they obviously couldn’t write a serious report in time. (23)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“A business or a big corporation is a fascist structure internally. Power is at the top. Orders go from top to bottom. You either follow the orders or get out. (20)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“To challenge the right of investors to determine who lives, who dies, and how they live and die — that would be a significant move toward Enlightenment ideals (actually the classical liberal ideal). That would be revolutionary. (19)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“The class warfare of the last decades has been fairly successful in weakening popular organizations. People are isolated. (18)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“The propaganda system has also whipped up hysteria about taxation (though we’re undertaxed by comparative standards) and about bureaucracies that interfere with profits — say, by protecting worker and consumer interests. Pointy-headed bureaucrats who funnel a public subsidy to industry and banks are just fine, of course. (16)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“…the idea was to try to put a cap on social spending, simply by debt. There would always be plenty to subsidize the rich. But they wouldn’t be able to pay aid to mothers with dependent children — only aid to dependent corporate executives. (15)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“Take the question of “infrastructure” or “human capital” — a kind of vulgar way of saying keep people alive and allow them to have an education. (13)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“Our actual economic policy is a mixture of protectionist, interventionist, free market and liberal measures. And it’s directed primarily to the needs of those who implement social policy, who are mostly the wealthy and the powerful. (10)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“Outside of ideologues, the academy and the press, no one thinks that capitalism is a viable system, and nobody has thought that for sixty or seventy years — if ever. (9)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“Throughout history, the structures of government have tended to coalesce around other forms of power — in modern times, primarily around economic power. (7)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“In the Third World, there’s a two-tiered society — a sector of extreme wealth and privilege, and a sector of huge misery and despair among useless, superfluous people. (6)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

“The crumbs that were permitted to ordinary people had to be taken away. Everything had to go to the rich. (5)”
― Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many