Quotes By 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.

I don't like the intellectual label.

Anti-Americanism is a pure totalitarian concept. The very notion is idiotic.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

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.

If you don't like what someone has to say, argue with them.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

States are not moral agents.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.

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.

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.

I don't have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

Sooner or later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous.

If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

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.

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.

I don't see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that's almost inconceivable.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

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.

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

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

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.

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