Quotes By Noam Chomsky
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
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
Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.
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
We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
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
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
The major advances in speed of communication and 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
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
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
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
Noam Chomsky
Stability is when the U.K. and U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.
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
Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.
Noam Chomsky
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
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
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
Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.
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
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
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
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
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
I remember at the age of five travelling 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