Noam Chomsky Quotes

If the NAACP were to impose a control of something towards all, then I would staunchly oppose it.

America is a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment.

Resource extraction impacts a global environment that is increasingly at severe risk.

The racism in Europe takes the form of anti-immigrant extremism - which is bad enough here - I think it's hard to measure, but my guess is that it's probably worse there.

If North Korea doesn't have a deterrent, they will be wiped out.

I don't think that the United States cares. They just assume that North Korea will soon have nuclear weapons.

The worst terrorist crimes going on right now are the drone campaigns.

They, students have a degree of freedom that nobody else has.

You ought to teach kids that elections take place but that's not politics. If you want to know how legislation is made it doesn't come from elections.

Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without massive government spending and in fact initiative.

Silicon Valley benefits, as all of industry, from highly protectionist policy - patent policies and things like that - which come out of the government.

We should not want to permit providers, for example to have control over access.

Take Google - I can use it, you can use it, anyone else can use it, but we all know its designed so that private power can influence significantly how you access it.

You know, you can go to the fiftieth thing on a Google list and that's the one you want, but the ones you are going to be directed to are the funders.

In a society that has very high concentration of capital in a narrow sector of the population, that's going to influence everything in different ways.

One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.

Its minority rule and majority limited rights. In fact it's set up that way. If you read the framers of the constitution, including James Madison, he was pretty clear about it.

The House of Representatives, which was closer to the population, had much less power. The executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor like today.

There is always room for Gramsci's "optimism of the will."

Anything feasible and potentially effective should be explored.

There is little doubt that a significant part of any serious solution will require advances of technology, but that can only be part of the solution. Other major changes are necessary.

Industrial production of meat makes a huge contribution to global warming.

For the last couple of hundred years, there have been struggles about this. Even the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the constitution talk about personal rights.

A woman was the property of her father or her husband and that remained true right into the twentieth century. It wasn't until 1975 that women had a guaranteed right to serve on federal juries.

Like most technology, the internet has mixed effects. It's a neutral instrument.

You can go into the Library of Congress and find information on just about anything, but that doesn't do you much good unless you know what you are looking for.

In fact, there is a very close correlation between human rights violations and US aid, particularly in Latin America.

Pakistan is not a unified country. In large parts of the country, the state is regarded as a Punjabi state, not their (the people's) state.

The dynamics of the Taliban now appear to be very different and complex, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, as they attack governments and mainstream parties.

Every wave of immigrants who came [to America] were treated pretty badly, but when they all finally became integrated, all of us became Anglo-Saxons.

Finally Irish were accepted into society and became part of the political system, and there were Kennedys, and so on. But the same is true about other waves of immigrants, like the Jews in the 1950s.

Yes, and Syrians. There is a horrible crisis there and the United States has admitted virtually none of the refugees.

Real wages for male workers in the United States are about what they were in the '60s.

The labor movement can be rebuilt, as has happened before after sharp declines.

[Moral responsibilities] has nothing particular to do with academia, except insofar as those within it tend to be unusually privileged in the respects just mentioned.

All you have to do is read the business literature. In the 1930s they were very frightened and they were concerned about how the rising power of the masses was hazardous to industrialists.

As for organs, traits, etc., being "for" something, the notion may be a useful shorthand, but shouldn't be taken too seriously, if only because of the ubiquitous phenomenon of exaptation.

Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language.

Academics are not necessarily nice people.

The reason academic disputes are so vicious is that so little is at stake.

There certainly are those who worship the state much as divinities are worshipped. Not just the state but even leaders.

In general I don't think the image of the state as a divinity is very helpful.

While the state can coerce, with some exceptions (like North Korea) it seems to me misleading to think of it as capable of "enslavement."

Democracy has both expanded and declined over the years.

That's a large part of the source of the gun culture. You have to have a gun when you go into Starbucks, because who knows what's going to happen. It just doesn't happen in other countries.

The Left, in a general sense, is very much atomized. We live in highly atomized societies. People are pretty much alone; it's you and your iPad.

The major organizing centers, like the labor movement, have been severely weakened in the United States by policy.

Private companies can make a personal profile, direct you to things - they will say - that you would be interested in, but that's their choice not your choice.

I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.

[Internet] is kind of like a hammer. The technology itself doesn't determine how its used. It depends on the social, cultural and economic context in which the technology is made available.