Top 36 Norman G. Finkelstein Quotes
#1. You know, frankly speaking, money just doesn't figure largely in my world view.
Norman Finkelstein
#2. The moment you have massive social and political commentary trying to explain a phenomenon, then you know we are no longer dealing with a strictly psychiatric question.
Norman Finkelstein
#3. I was probably unusually close to my parents, so I do what I can now to preserve the integrity of their memory. The Holocaust deserves to be remembered.
Norman Finkelstein
#4. They used to say Palestinians fight like heroes, now they say heroes fight like Palestinians
Norman Finkelstein
#5. DePaul's plot to deny me tenure had nothing to do with my faults. In fact, and ironically, it viciously attacked me and destroyed my career because of my virtues. Which, although few in number, they still found threatening.
Norman Finkelstein
#6. There is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary, and uncomplicated question.
Norman Finkelstein
#8. International law says people fighting for self-determination can use force in order to achieve their independence.
Norman Finkelstein
#9. I was bashing Israel in the past because nobody else was exposing its true record. Many people are doing it now, so I switched hats from a critic of Israel to a diplomat who wants to resolve the conflict. I have not changed, but I think the spectrum has moved.
Norman Finkelstein
#10. I think sometimes we underestimate just how vulnerable Israel is on the public-relations front. That's why they spend so much money on propaganda. And that's why they panic every time they feel like they're losing the propaganda war.
Norman Finkelstein
#11. People have to liberate themselves, because liberation is not a single act. It's a question of eternal vigilance. Otherwise, you'll just become enslaved by someone else.
Norman Finkelstein
#12. My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies of the Israeli state and US support for these policies.
Norman G. Finkelstein
#13. Given the nonsense that is turned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are so few skeptics.
Norman Finkelstein
#15. If there were an Oscar for best theatrical performance by a country, Israel would win every year. It's a country based on theater. It's a lunatic state - completely insane.
Norman Finkelstein
#16. Judging by opinion polls, Israel has bigger problems than me. It is among the most hated countries on the planet. It should stop acting like a lunatic state. Once it carries on like a normal country, I will be happily redirect my energies elsewhere.
Norman Finkelstein
#17. Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.
Norman G. Finkelstein
#18. A sure sign of ineptitude and malice is manifested when one's attacker is willing to cover himself with mud in order to try and make some of it adhere to his target.
Christopher Hitchens
#19. Insofar as Zionism sought to solve the Jewish question, it must be reckoned not just a failure but a catastrophe: Israel is the main cause of anti-Semitism in the world today.
Norman Finkelstein
#20. When I was a young man, my mother said to me, 'You can't be a communist without being a militant atheist.' So I had to be a militant atheist because I wanted to be a communist.
Norman Finkelstein
#21. Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became 'pro'-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.' s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive.
Norman Finkelstein
#22. I don't claim to know Israel. I don't speak Hebrew; my contacts are pretty limited. But I didn't know Vietnam; I didn't know Nicaragua, El Salvador or Honduras. It doesn't mean you can't reach your conclusions.
Norman Finkelstein
#23. Personal convictions are not politics. Personal convictions, if they become the subject of a group conviction, they become a cult.
Norman Finkelstein
#24. The whole purpose of annual reviews is to keep you abreast of whether or not you are fulfilling the requirements of tenure.
Norman Finkelstein
#25. I don't want to become a rhetorical speaker. My effectiveness is mastering all of the data and being able to respond.
Norman Finkelstein
#26. I focus on my work. If I let myself get distracted by the insults and slanders I wouldn't get anything substantive done.
Norman Finkelstein
#27. I think that people like Bloomberg, they're complete thugs. No question about it. But on the other hand, it must be said that they are politically savvy. They don't get into those positions of power - in the case of Bloomberg, both economic and political power - by being anybody's fool.
Norman Finkelstein
#28. I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. And we have to be honest about that. While the rest of the world wants peace, Europe wants peace, the US wants peace, but this state wants war, war and war.
Norman Finkelstein
#29. I don't want to pretend to be a prophet or a saint. I'm very conscious of my limitations. I know my flaws. But I don't like lying.
Norman Finkelstein
#30. Why should these Palestinians, who have lived in Jerusalem for hundreds of years, be evicted from their homes so that Jews from Brooklyn can live in them?
Norman Finkelstein
#31. There's nothing Israel can do without US support. It can't breathe without US support. The US bankrolls everything, and it's just silly to think that Israel can do anything without the support.
Norman Finkelstein
#32. I'm politically on the left, no question about it. I oppose sweatshops, I oppose exploitation of labour in the third world.
Norman Finkelstein
#33. I no longer say I'm unemployed. I say I'm unemployable. It's different. An unemployed suggests at a certain point in the future, you might be employed. That's not the case with me. I'm unemployable, and unfortunately, that's one of the bits of the web, in particular of Google.
Norman Finkelstein
#34. I don't feel particularly attached to Israel - 'nationalism,' as Noam Chomsky said, 'is not my cup of tea' - but I feel no particular need to demonize it.
Norman Finkelstein
#35. No doubt one can, in light of further study and life experience, come to repudiate past convictions.
Norman Finkelstein
#36. The Zionists indeed learnt well from the Nazis. So well that it seems that their morally repugnant treatment of the Palestinians, and their attempts to destroy Palestinian society within Israel and the occupied territories, reveals them as basically Nazis with beards and black hats.
Norman Finkelstein
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