Quotes About Noam Chomsky

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

Sidney Hook

#2. Please stop putting quotes from Nietzsche at the end of your emails. Five years ago you were laughing your guts out over American Pie 2. What - suddenly you've magically turned into Noam Chomsky?

Douglas Coupland

#3. I read Noam Chomsky. I like some of Gore Vidal's stuff.

John Cusack

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.

Hugo Chavez

#8. The main job of radicals in the Noam Chomsky or G. Gordon Liddy mode is to go around from one scruffy lecture hall to another reminding audiences while they may be disdained or ignored by the mainstream culture, they are actually right about everything.

David Brooks

#9. Some of the big philosophical problems have been solved by science, at least to a 1st approximation. Examples: the problems of matter, and mind. Only philosophical reactionaries, like Noam Chomsky, claim that they are and will remain mysteries.

Mario Bunge

#10. The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.

Terry Eagleton

#11. I think Noam Chomsky is a national treasure - make that an international treasure.

Jello Biafra

#12. If you abandon the political arena, somebody is going to be there. Corporations aren't going to go home and join the PTA. They are going to run things.

Noam Chomsky

#13. Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.

Noam Chomsky

#14. 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

#15. Classical liberalism was wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, but

Noam Chomsky

#16. 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

#17. States are not moral agents.

Noam Chomsky

#18. 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

#19. In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

Noam Chomsky

#20. 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

#21. 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

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

Noam Chomsky

#23. At their most eloquent, proponents of neoliberalism sound as if they are doing poor people, the environment, and everybody else a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few. The

Noam Chomsky

#24. Unlike Europe, China can't be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they've been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don't see any need to.

Noam Chomsky

#25. As Chomsky says, if you act like there is no possibility of change for the better, you guarantee that there will be no change for the better. The choice is ours, the choice is yours. Robert

Noam Chomsky

#26. Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing.

Noam Chomsky

#27. It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.

Noam Chomsky

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

Noam Chomsky

#29. The public is strongly in favor of the Kyoto Protocols, so strongly in favor that a majority of Bush voters thought that he was in favor of it. They are simply unaware.

Noam Chomsky

#30. The freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

Noam Chomsky

#31. Some international law specialists compare the invasion of Iraq to the 'crimes against the peace' for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg.

Noam Chomsky

#32. People not only don't know what's happening to them, they don't even know that they don't know.

Noam Chomsky

#33. Governments don't control people like they used to.

Noam Chomsky

#34. Barron and Paul ... rely on 'specialists' at the State and Defense Departments ... Elsewhere in the media, similiar figures are bandied about, with equal credibility.

Noam Chomsky

#35. The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.

Noam Chomsky

#36. It's not radical Islam that worries the US
it's independence

Noam Chomsky

#37. The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself.

Noam Chomsky

#38. I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.

Noam Chomsky

#39. There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind

Noam Chomsky

#40. Morris Halle was already working on a generative phonology of Russian in the 1950s, and we also worked together on the generative phonology of English, at first jointly with Fred Lukoff.

Noam Chomsky

#41. Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.

Noam Chomsky

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. War is a racket. The few profit, the many pay.

Noam Chomsky

#45. Now is not the time to look at the past. Lets look forward to the future.
Diplomats know very well that these are standard slogans for those who are engaged in serious crimes.

Noam Chomsky

#46. With regard to freedom of expression there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it in favor of Stalinist/Fascist standards.

Noam Chomsky

#47. (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

#48. I don't buy much. Almost buy nothing. I buy what I need, do it the easiest way possible.

Noam Chomsky

#49. At Harvard they teach people how to rule the world and at MIT they teach them how to make the world work. This is for the elite schools. For the rest, turn them into servants.

Noam Chomsky

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. A few days after my new state occupied my village, I became a prisoner of war rather than a citizen.

Noam Chomsky

#53. The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet.

Noam Chomsky

#54. Half the population hold that the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves, as polls regularly show.

Noam Chomsky

#55. Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

Noam Chomsky

#56. Authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled.

Noam Chomsky

#57. 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

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

Noam Chomsky

#59. The worst drug of all by far is tobacco; the death toll from tobacco is just overwhelming.

Noam Chomsky

#60. Expressing criticism of society is not being a grouch.

Noam Chomsky

#61. International relations bears more than a slight resemblance to the mafia.

Noam Chomsky

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

Noam Chomsky

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

Noam Chomsky

#67. In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students.

Noam Chomsky

#68. Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?

Noam Chomsky

#69. 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

#70. So if a person produces an object on command, Humboldt wrote, we may admire what he did but we will despise what he is, not a true human being who acts in his own impulses and desires.

Noam Chomsky

#71. Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent - and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence.

Noam Chomsky

#72. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Noam Chomsky

#73. 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

#74. The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they're being objective.

Noam Chomsky

#75. 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

#76. The rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization, because organization just causes trouble. People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action.

Noam Chomsky

#77. Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don't just succumb.

Noam Chomsky

#78. One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story.

Noam Chomsky

#79. Ontological questions are generally beside the point, hardly more than a form of harassment.

Noam Chomsky

#80. Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.

Noam Chomsky

#81. intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

Noam Chomsky

#82. When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn't producing any more.

Noam Chomsky

#83. 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

#84. Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.

Noam Chomsky

#85. In Latin America, specialists and polling organisations have, for some time, observed that the extension of formal democracy was accompanied by an increasing disillusionment about democracy and a lack of faith in democratic institutions.

Noam Chomsky

#86. [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

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

Noam Chomsky

#88. 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

#89. In September 1993, President Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn - the climax of a 'day of awe,' as the press described it.

Noam Chomsky

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. US relations with the World Court and other international institutions have undergone a similar evolution, to which we return.

Noam Chomsky

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.

Noam Chomsky

#97. It was declared by Congress that marijuana makes people insane. But ... lawyers, defense lawyers, got the idea, OK, I can use this for an insanity defense.

Noam Chomsky

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

Noam Chomsky

#99. 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

#100. The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.

Noam Chomsky