Noam Chomsky Quotes:- Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, cognitive scientist, philosopher, historian, social critic, and political commentator.
Sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics”, Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.
Inspirational Noam Chomsky Quotes
States are not moral agents, people are and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
Noam Chomsky
The major advances in the speed of communication and the ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!
Noam Chomsky
It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.
Noam Chomsky
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.
Noam Chomsky
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
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
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
Noam Chomsky
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Noam Chomsky
I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
Noam Chomsky
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
Noam Chomsky
The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
Noam Chomsky
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involve a process of free creation.
Noam Chomsky
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
Noam Chomsky
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
Noam Chomsky
Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.
Noam Chomsky
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Noam Chomsky
The only justification for repressive institutions is a material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.
Noam Chomsky
The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants, and aliens, the more you control all the people.
Noam Chomsky
Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.
Noam Chomsky
To some degree, it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.
Noam Chomsky
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
Noam Chomsky
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analog in the animal world.
Noam Chomsky
The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.
Noam Chomsky
In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that’s international terror, and we can go on and on.
Noam Chomsky
How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.
Noam Chomsky
Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.
Noam Chomsky
I remember at the age of five traveling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.
Noam Chomsky
I don’t like the intellectual label.
Noam Chomsky
In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.
Noam Chomsky
If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don’t have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.
Noam Chomsky
Language is a weapon of politicians, but the language is a weapon in much of human affairs.
Noam Chomsky
Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.
Noam Chomsky
Markets have built-in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies that are well known.
Noam Chomsky
I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.
Noam Chomsky
Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.
Noam Chomsky
If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.
Noam Chomsky
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
Anywhere in Latin America, there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.
Noam Chomsky
For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.
Noam Chomsky
The concentration of executive power, unless it’s very temporary and for specific circumstances, let’s say fighting world war two, it’s an assault on democracy.
Noam Chomsky
I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.
Noam Chomsky
The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.
Noam Chomsky
Real popular culture is folk art – coalminers’ songs and so forth.
Noam Chomsky
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
Sooner or later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous.
Noam Chomsky
As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states – no more, no less.
Noam Chomsky
State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.
Noam Chomsky
In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice, and freedom – along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.
Noam Chomsky
The ‘anti-globalization movement’ is the most significant proponent of globalization – but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.
Noam Chomsky
States are not moral agents.
Noam Chomsky
The government of Israel doesn’t like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world.
Noam Chomsky
Stability is when the U.K. and the U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.
Noam Chomsky
In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.
Noam Chomsky
There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.
Noam Chomsky
You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.
Noam Chomsky
In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.
Noam Chomsky
In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.
Noam Chomsky
My proposal happens to be very mainstream.
Noam Chomsky
Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.
Noam Chomsky
I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.
Noam Chomsky
I would appear on Fox News more easily than I would NPR.
Noam Chomsky
If you do a Google search, you will probably read a lot of stuff about how I am someone who wants to kill all the Jews and hates the United States.
Noam Chomsky
It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.
Noam Chomsky
Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes… to an extent, that’s true elsewhere, including the United States, but it’s been pretty extreme in Greece.
Noam Chomsky
When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream. I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said.
Noam Chomsky
Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information. You expect to see delusion and imagery.
Noam Chomsky
If you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.
Noam Chomsky
I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t use to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.
Noam Chomsky
As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‘renouncing beliefs’ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‘renounce beliefs’ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.
Noam Chomsky
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.
Noam Chomsky
If you could take a subway from the suburbs in Boston, where I live, to downtown in 10 minutes, that improves your life over sitting in a traffic jam. People should see that.
Noam Chomsky
Markets are lethal if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.
Noam Chomsky
