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Quotes by Noam Chomsky

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.
– Noam Chomsky
American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.
– Noam Chomsky
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
– Noam Chomsky
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
– Noam Chomsky
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
– Noam Chomsky
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
– Noam Chomsky
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.
– 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
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
– Noam Chomsky
I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
– Noam Chomsky
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
– Noam Chomsky
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
– 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
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
– Noam Chomsky
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.
– Noam Chomsky
Personally, I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.
– Noam Chomsky
Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century.
– Noam Chomsky
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
– Noam Chomsky
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.
– Noam Chomsky
Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.
– Noam Chomsky
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
– Noam Chomsky
The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
– 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
The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
– 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
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.
– Noam Chomsky
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.
– Noam Chomsky
There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.
– Noam Chomsky
Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that - it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.
– 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
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
– Noam Chomsky
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.
– Noam Chomsky
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
– Noam Chomsky
Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.
– Noam Chomsky
There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
– Noam Chomsky
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.
– 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
The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.
– 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.
– 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
Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.
– 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
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.
– 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
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
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.
– Noam Chomsky
If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.
– Noam Chomsky
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.
– Noam Chomsky
I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.
– 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
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.
– Noam Chomsky