Quotes By 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.

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.

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

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

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.

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.

The 'anti-globalisation movement' is the most significant proponent of globalisation - but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

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.

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.

Governments don't control people like they used to.

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!

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.

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

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.

Stability is when the U.K. and U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

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.

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.

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.

Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

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.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

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 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.