Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

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

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

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

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.

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

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

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

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

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

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

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.

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

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.

Governments don't control people like they used to.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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

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.