Noam Chomsky Quotes

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

A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the...

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ...

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be...

It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about...

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a ...

Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has...

In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sen...

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of his...

Well before September 11, it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will ...

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other ...

I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and dominat...

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know it...

Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that af...

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in ...

...if you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explan...

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a me...

Small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences. [Source: Al Jazeera 'Up...

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. ...

China is a great manufacturing center, but it's actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles p...

Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in...

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

I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sp...

Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?

It is probable that the most inhuman monsters, even the Himmlers and the Mengeles, convince themselv...

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts o...

It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell to...

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political powe...

Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amou...

...the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

There's very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfact...

When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: "Why do I care if my high school's team wins ...

That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be aga...

The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if yo...

Modern industrial civilisation has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The drivin...

Willingness to be puzzled is a valuable trait to cultivate, from childhood to advanced inquiry.

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden...

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in ...

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals ...

As far as U.S. intelligence knows, Iran is developing nuclear capacities, but they don't know if the...

See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.

The ritual denunciation of the so-called ‘socialist’ states is replete with distortions and often ou...

Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general ...

The principle of universality is not a 'theory'. Just moral truism.

Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats a...

To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I ...

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something tru...

The country that consistently ranks among the highest in educational achievement is Finland. A rich ...

In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats ...

Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It's a...

In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But...

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, ther...

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and re...

Thinking is a human feature. Will AI someday really think? That's like asking if submarines swim. If...

... if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is ri...

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population th...

The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of a...

This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars—they would think...

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training ...

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decl...

Social Security is based on a principle. It's based on the principle that you care about other peopl...

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to...

In 1949, China declared independence - an event known in Western discourse as 'the loss of China' in...

Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally ...

Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard...

Life among clones would not be worth living, and a sane person will only rejoice that others have ab...

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overco...

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is workin...

The close Turkish-Israeli relations go back to the late 1950s - military intelligence, commercial, m...

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people a...

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You wa...

Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a soci...

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated - Japan's attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl...

It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of free...

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of ou...

My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. Fo...

One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics, as h...

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria ...

If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it.

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and w...

I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother...

There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says th...

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no p...

The other day I happened to be reading a careful, interesting account of the state of British higher...

One of the difficulties in raising public concern over the very severe threats of global warming is ...

The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in ...

If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to ...

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to c...

These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Hu...

Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peac...

It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people kill...

If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.

The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in...

International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, e...

Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know,...

Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first presi...

Today, we have private airline companies, but if you take a look at a Boeing plane next time you tra...

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that...

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.