Noam Chomsky Quotes

Destruction of the environment is not only rational; it's exactly what you're taught to do in college.

The development of space technology, including space warfare today, is similar in its technological-industrial significance to the development of navies a hundred years ago.

It's fine to criticize somebody else's crimes and misdeeds, but you don't talk about your own. The only exception is a country that is defeated. And even that is rather nuanced.

The US reasserted control over Nicaragua in 1990. Since then, the country has experienced a steep decline. It's now the second poorest country in the hemisphere.

The whole basis for the US intervention in Colombia is outrageously racist and arrogant.

It's not in doubt that tobacco is far more lethal than hard drugs.

A big producer can survive price fluctuations on the world market. A small farmer can't.

Today, aid to Colombia is given under the pretext of a drug war. That's pretty hard to take seriously. Ten years ago, Amnesty International flatly called it a myth.

There are many cases around the world in which the presence of UN peace-keeping forces has had a somewhat beneficial effect.

On intervention under the UN framework, I think that sometimes that's legitimate, in fact even helpful.

I agree with Bill Clinton that US forces should not be sent to Haiti, but not for his reasons.

This is class war on an international scale, and power is in the hands of those who control the international economic system.

You have 30% of the world unemployed, a huge amount of work, that needs to be done just rebuilding the society alone.

It is reported that about 30% of the world's population is unemployed. That's worse than the Great Depression, but it's now an international phenomenon.

People have no human rights, only the rights that they can gain on the labour market. Above all, wealth and power have to be protected.

Workers in different countries can easily be played off against each other.

The capacity to transfer production elsewhere is a weapon against the Western workers.

Parts of the United States are taking on a Third World look.

It [the internet] probably has the effect of weakening personal associations.

I happen to agree with the anti-dictatorship policies, but I don't think it's the role of General Electric to support them or oppose them. They do of course, but I don't agree with that.

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.

What Wikileaks exposed is kind of superficial in a way.

Most of what is done I think is to kept secret so the public won't know. The same is true of what Wikileaks exposed.

But on the contrary Wikileaks is under heavy attack by the government and corporations are participating in that by closing down their websites.

Wikileaks is a democratizing force. Its giving individuals access to decisions and thinking by their representatives and in a democracy that ought to be reflexive.

Technology can also be used so that private individuals will have access to the way centralized decisions are being made.

I don't know what it means to say that 'the internet should have a voice in Washington'.

After all, the internet originated around 1960 and wasn't privatized until 1995. That's thirty five years in the public domain during the hard, creative development period.

The IMF economists were doubtless shaken by the extreme failures of their prescriptions over many years, and by the collapse of the intellectual edifice of economic theory on which they were relying.

Procurement is a major technique of state subsidy.

In a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time. They're instinctive Marxists.

As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.

The UN to some extent diffuses U.S. power. Therefore it's less direct an agency of the United States than the U.S. Army is. But still, it can't escape the distribution of power in the world.

The UN can go as far as the U.S. will allow, and no further. And it's bound by conditions that the powerful states, which means mostly the U.S., impose.

We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.

Free markets are based on the free circulation of labor. If you don't have free circulation of labor, you don't have free markets.

In the United States everyone is an illegal immigrant - everyone except the people in Indian Reservations. This is an immigrant society.

Should a community... be free to enact legislation to say they don't want blacks? Now that's illegal. Fifty years ago it was legal. Is that progress or is that regress?

I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative.

As elite attitudes towards public education over time illustrate, simple formulas are far from adequate. There are conflicting tendencies.

In my experience at least, the large public universities do not fall behind in fostering creativity and independence; often the contrary.

No use in waiting, we can all work hard to bring about changes.

You have to rely on yourself and your associates - gifts don't come from above; you're going to win them, or you won't have them.

You win by struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the options and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot.

Starting with [Ronald] Regan it became quite open, the attack on unions. It wasn't the Pinkertons anymore, but it was just not applying the laws.

They [unions] used straight Marxist rhetoric [in 1930s] - just the values were changed.

We could not bring democracy to South Vietnam at a cost that we were willing to accept. So it was a disaster. That' is the left extreme.

Nobody can successfully defy the master of the hemisphere [America], in fact of the world, hence the savagery.

You know, people talk about [Richard] Nixon's "madman theory." We don't really know much about that. It was in memoirs, by somebody else.

[After Vietnam] the type of interventions that are carried out are designed so as not to elicit public reactions.