Quotes By Noam Chomsky
I don't see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that's almost inconceivable.
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
You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.
Noam Chomsky
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
How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.
Noam Chomsky
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
Noam Chomsky
There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
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
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
Noam Chomsky
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
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
Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.
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
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
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
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
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
The 'anti-globalisation movement' is the most significant proponent of globalisation - but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.
Noam Chomsky
Stability is when the U.K. and U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.
Noam Chomsky
The only justification for repressive institutions is 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
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
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