Noam Chomsky Quotes

The United States is a violent military state. It's been involved in military action all over the place.

The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.

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

These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.

What the public wants is called 'politically unrealistic.' Translated into English, that means power and privilege are opposed to it.

Education is imposed ignorance.

These are questions for action, not speculation, which is idle.

The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.

We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid.

As long as each individual is facing the television tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege

I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.

The childcare tax credit makes some sense.

In November 2004, U.S. occupation forces launched their second major attack on the city of Falluja. The press reported major war crimes instantly, with approval.

It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.

On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.

Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.

Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.

The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.

The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.

It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.

I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

Individuals in a university - students, faculty, staff - can choose to become politically engaged, and a free university should foster a climate in which those are natural choices.

It's true that many say that [they] object to the idea of "human nature," but it's not clear what that is supposed to mean. Are we different from ants?

Take something you really don't think about: Plastics in the ocean. I mean plastics in the ocean have an enormous ecological effect.

To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.

I'm sorry to say it has some historical analogs. It's kind of reminiscent of what happened in Germany in the late Weimar years.

The Republican establishment, the mainstream corporate financial wealth, is getting to a point where it can't control the base it's mobilized.

I've occasionally been asked to talk on Israel-Palestine. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it elicits hysteria in the community.

In the United States, and to a certain extent in Canada, there's very little interest in what happens outside their borders.

The United States is a very insular society. Most people know very little about the outside world and don't care that much. They're concerned with their own affairs.

People don't have knowledge and understanding about the outside world, or about history [in the USA].

When something isn't constantly drummed-up by the media, [people] just don't know about it.

It seems self-evident that we should want people to be free, to be able to play an active part in making decisions about matters of concern to them, to the largest possible extent.

We should therefore be opposed to institutional barriers to that freedom: Military dictatorships, for example. Or states run by a Central Committee.

Pakistan just cannot survive if it continues to do so (continue this confrontation with India).

I'm into eating as little as possible, paying as little attention as possible. I never cook. Never use the stove or anything.

Plainly elites in America don't want democracy. And why should they? Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.

I don't like piracy but if anybody's concerned about piracy, why don't they pay attention to our role in it?

The change between horse and buggy to automobile is a big change and there hasn't been a major change since.

There's a tremendous amount of language loss. Most of the attention is given to indigenous languages, which makes sense, but some of the most dramatic language loss is in Europe.

Very urgent measures need to be taken, and without much delay, in dealing with the ongoing destruction of the environment.

The educational system is pretty much geared to passing the next exam. You're educated to pass tests and not to understand.

A democracy barely functions under the neoliberal system.

Right now, we happen to be in a general period of regression, not just in education. A lot of what's happening is sort of backlash to the 60s; the 60s were a democratizing period.

Education is not just you learn how a mosquito flies in the rain, but you learn how to be creative and why it's exciting to learn things and create things and make up new things.

Obama's latest line is that he didn't establish a "red line" but the world did through its conventions on chemical warfare.

If you have worker-owned and worker-managed enterprises, you've got a different sociopolitical system.

There are enormous opportunities to work for a world that is more free, peaceful and just.

There are a lot of things that can be done within the framework of existing institutions which would be very valuable for people.

There are all the activist groups on every imaginable topic - solidarity groups, environmental and feminist groups - sectors of these movements do very valuable work.