Top 100 Chomsky's Quotes

#1. Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That's pretty obvious. You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case ...

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #1247
#2. Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs - hadn't been done for a long time, and it's illegal in most countries - in the air controller strike.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #3730
#3. Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That's just fine. It's just the poor who aren't supposed to cooperate.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #4659
#4. The time to be political is not when you have parties and carnivals, it's kind of a show, the election. It affects something but not that much. And focusing all the attention on it is I think a mistake.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #7723
#5. As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #14017
#6. People not only don't know what's happening to them, they don't even know that they don't know.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #40749
#7. It's not radical Islam that worries the US
it's independence

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #53037
#8. Noam Chomsky skittles and skithers all over the political landscape to distract the reader's attention from the plain truth.

Sidney Hook

Chomsky's Quotes #56154
#9. When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #66837
#10. In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #67404
#11. (I think, legally speaking, there's a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They've all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes.) The

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #84807
#12. When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #88547
#13. The U.S. is just in a class by itself in military expenses. It basically matches the rest of the world, and it's far more advanced.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #88711
#14. Education is not for profit. If you're not in education for profit, it's not going to be a fair critique for education.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #101810
#15. Peace is preferable to war. But it's not an absolute value, and so we always ask, What kind of peace?

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #102157
#16. Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #106113
#17. Technology is usually fairly neutral. It's like a hammer, which can be used to build a house or to destroy someone's home. The hammer doesn't care. It is almost always up to us to determine whether the technology is good or bad.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #108766
#18. The health care system in the United States, I'm sure you know, is a total international scandal. It's twice the per capita cost of comparable countries and one of the worst outcomes, with a huge number of people uninsured altogether. And it's going to get worse.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #110606
#19. It's designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #112716
#20. American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #118074
#21. Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #123762
#22. All through Latin America, there's sharp condemnation of the criminal atrocities of Sept. 11. But it's qualified by the observation that although these are horrible atrocities, they are not unfamiliar.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #133386
#23. It's quite standard for those who hold the clubs to say: "Forget about everything that happened and let's just go on from here." In other words, "I've got what I want, and out forget about what your concerns are. I'll just take what I want.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #152372
#24. [A]s long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if meaningful.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #159234
#25. For many of the world's conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #165682
#26. In fact, when drugs are legalized, use sometimes goes down, it's been claimed. Part of the reason is that teenage kids use illicit drugs because they are illicit. They are thumbing their noses at society. If they were legal, they might not.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #166053
#27. If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #168042
#28. Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #177372
#29. If the principle is, "Let's not get lethal substances out to the public", the first one you'd go after is tobacco. The next one you'd go after is alcohol. Way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #180116
#30. In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #181241
#31. It hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world's largest open-air prison.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #181484
#32. There's no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Genghis Khan.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #185404
#33. The U.S. has strategic and economic interests in Southeast Asia that must be secured. Holding Indochina is essential to securing these interests. Therefore, we must hold Indochina.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #188501
#34. It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #190624
#35. In every country except - industrial country except the United States, the government uses its massive purchasing power to negotiate drug prices. That's one of the reasons prices are so much higher in the United States than in other countries.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #194645
#36. Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today's political scene.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #199381
#37. What's important in Libya is, first of all, it has a good deal of oil. A lot of the country is unexplored; there may be a lot more. And it's very high-quality oil, so very valuable.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #208148
#38. The public is easily amenable to lies: the more lies there are, the greater the support for war. For instance, when the public was told that Saddam Hussein would attack the U.S., this increased support for the war.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #219685
#39. Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #230325
#40. We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #235689
#41. In November 2007, the White House issued a Declaration of Principles demanding that U.S. forces must remain indefinitely in Iraq and committing Iraq to privilege American investors.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #249345
#42. An individual's refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #254874
#43. The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy's finest hour.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #257131
#44. My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #258421
#45. The Republican Party has become overwhelmingly so extreme that it's hardly a traditional political party anymore.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #258677
#46. A sit-down strike is just one step short of saying, "Look, instead of sitting down, we'll run this place. We don't need owners and managers." That's huge. That could be done in Detroit and in other places that are being closed down.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #260166
#47. It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we've seen with the Internet's development.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #290002
#48. The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn't make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn't discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That's what you've got a brain for.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #293032
#49. The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #297877
#50. The Irish sea is a chasm, and it just depends who's been holding the whip for 800 years and who's been under it for 800 years.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #310378
#51. There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #330014
#52. Why not stakeholder action? There's no economic principal that says that management should be responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business economics that they could just as well have a system in which the management is responsible to stakeholders.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #333222
#53. It's not a free trade agreement. It has virtually nothing to do with free trade ... It's a protectionist agreement; it's anti free-trade.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #340026
#54. There are massive efforts on the part of the internet's corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #345537
#55. If you destroyed half the pharmaceutical production in the United States, we'd think it's a pretty serious problem. In fact, we'd probably go to war.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #346764
#56. The list of U.S. vetoes at the Security Council to protect Israeli aggression and occupation is huge.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #365887
#57. The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that's not just true of languages. It's true of every subject.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #368388
#58. There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office - anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #370127
#59. The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there's something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #370537
#60. If you decide not to make use of the opportunities you have, not to live your life in a way that's constructive and helpful, you end up looking back and asking, 'why did I bother living?

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #371122
#61. Egypt is the second-largest recipient over a long period of U.S. military and economic aid. Israel is first.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #378119
#62. There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that's been going on since the Second World War.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #379241
#63. Well, they really didn't have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can't do anything. Look, there's one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision-that's the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #412550
#64. Obama's primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #417028
#65. There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it's a period of close to global stagnation.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #422541
#66. I read Noam Chomsky. I like some of Gore Vidal's stuff.

John Cusack

Chomsky's Quotes #432407
#67. Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'

Salman Rushdie

Chomsky's Quotes #442478
#68. You tell the big lie by carefully selecting only the small, isolated truths, linking them in such a way that that advance the bigger lie by painting a picture inside the viewer's head. The Ascended High Master of this Dark Art is Noam Chomsky.

Bill Whittle

Chomsky's Quotes #443977
#69. In Egypt, on the eve of Tahrir Square, there was a major poll which found that overwhelmingly - 80-90%, numbers like that - Egyptians regarded the main threats they face as the U.S. and Israel. They don't like Iran - Arabs generally don't like Iran - but they didn't consider it a threat.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #444540
#70. 'Reform' is a word you always aughta' watch out for. 'Reform' is a change that you're supposed to like. And watch it - As soon as you hear the word 'Reform', you should reach for your wallet and see who's lifting it.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #445283
#71. During the 1960s, large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands.? The naive might call that democracy, but that's because they don't understand. The sophisticated understand that that's the crisis of democracy.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #455059
#72. Guantanamo is still open, but it's unlikely that serious torture is going on at Guantanamo. There is just too much inspection.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #455271
#73. I've been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan's vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #468863
#74. Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they're attacking, like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That's the standard way to run imperial wars.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #481799
#75. Everyone who is critical of Israeli policy is deluged by crazed messages intended to flood their email system or, more insidiously, passwords are accessed and messages sent out under their name! I'm sure it's illegal. It's also an effort to undermine free speech.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #487232
#76. The U.S. is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #487392
#77. In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it's low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift - a striking shift - from production to financialization.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #489152
#78. Around 2008 and again in 2013 NATO officially offered the Ukraine the opportunity to join NATO. That's something no Russian government is ever going to accept. It's right at the geopolitical heartland of Russia.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #489911
#79. It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #491054
#80. 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.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #496680
#81. There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn't work like that ... There's a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #497131
#82. The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That's never been impossible and never been easy.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #505228
#83. Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #507930
#84. There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #510026
#85. Amnesty International, which was opening its yearlong campaign to protect human rights defenders in Colombia in response to the country's horrifying record of attacks against human rights and labor activists and mostly the usual victims of state terror: the poor and defenseless.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #528523
#86. The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #530323
#87. If you're independent-minded in school, you're probably going to get in trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's being preferred or cultivated.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #530851
#88. In the U.S. Constitution there was a category of creatures called three-fifth humans - the enslaved population. They weren't considered persons. And in fact women were barely considered persons, so they didn't have rights.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #556624
#89. In much of the world the U.S. is regarded as a leading terrorist state.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #558710
#90. I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organisational function - that's important, and fine, and I support it.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #558807
#91. It's very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It's much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I'm going to believe what I like, but I'll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #567317
#92. In this case, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's orders were being carried out - "anything that flies on anything that moves," an open call for genocide that is rare in the historical record.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #570807
#93. The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #574801
#94. The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that's happening.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #575338
#95. If you want to talk about distributing substances that are lethal, ... let's be serious. Tobacco is far ahead of anything else. Alcohol is second.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #589567
#96. It's a class war, and a war on young people too ... that's why tuition is rising so rapidly. There's no real economic reason for that. It's a technique of control and indoctrination. And this is really the first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #593236
#97. If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #593877
#98. There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #610576
#99. Remember, the U.S. is a powerful state, it's not like Libya. If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The United States hires terrorist states.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #625870
#100. I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's Quotes #627652

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