« The public is not sovereign in the media. Owners and managers looking for advertising decide the offer on which the public's choice will have to take place. People generally only read and look at what is directly accessible and is intensively promoted. Surveys regularly indicate that the public, although they listen to and watch what is being offered to them, would like more news, documentaries and different information, less sex and violence, and some other kind of entertainment. It seems unlikely that it would be really indifferent to citizens as to why their incomes are stagnating or even declining, while they are working harder and harder; why the medical care they have access to is as expensive as it is poor or neglect what can be perpetrated on their behalf all over the world. If they are so unaware of such topics, the propaganda model explains why: those who exercise sovereignty over the media have decided not to address such issues. »

« The phenomena that grammar deals with are at some level explained by the rules of grammar itself and by the interaction of these rules. At a higher level, these same phenomena are explained by the principles that determine the choice of grammar on the basis of the limited and incomplete experience available to the person who acquired knowledge of the language and who built this particular grammar. The principles that determine the form of grammar and choose an appropriate grammar on the basis of certain facts constitute a subject that could, according to traditional usage, be called "universal grammar". The study of universal grammar thus understood is a study of the nature of human intellectual abilities. »

« In many respects, of course, American society is open and liberal values are honoured. However, as the poor, blacks and members of other ethnic minorities know only too well, the liberal veneer is very thin. As Mark Twain wrote, "It is through God's goodness that our country has three infinitely precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and prudence of not practicing either." Those who lack this caution may well pay the price. »