Tempus Fugit

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.

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