Quotes By Noam Chomsky

It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

My proposal happens to be very mainstream.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

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.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media.

When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.

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

For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.

In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

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.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I don't like the intellectual label.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.

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.