Noam Chomsky Quotes

Modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable.

The freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.

The people who live on the land - Israelis and Palestinians - have a right to live in security and peace.

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.

The responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.

The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it.

After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the 'sense of utter irresponsibility' shown by the demonstrators.

The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.

In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party.

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

. . . among all grammars meeting this condition (of adequacy), we select the simplest.

Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for - presidential medal of honor.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

I don't think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.

I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don't know how much experience you've had with contemporary Hebrew. It's quite difficult.

I don't like the intellectual label.

State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.

We're supposed to worship Adam Smith but you're not supposed to read him. That's too dangerous.

If you want to end terrorism stop participating in it.

Barron and Paul...rely on 'specialists' at the State and Defense Departments...Elsewhere in the media, similiar figures are bandied about, with equal credibility.

You might recall, perhaps, that we were probably the only commentators to rely on the most knowledgeable source, State Department intelligence.

If we move toward the weaponisation of space, we can bid farewell to the planet. The chances of survival are very slight.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia - that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself.

Latin America has much richer resources. You'd expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

Surely few if any readers have come across the sentence they are now reading, and someone who had by chance heard or seen it could not possibly remember such a fact.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

The Republican and Democratic Parties are only factions of the Government Party.

It's not a free trade agreement. It has virtually nothing to do with free trade... It's a protectionist agreement; it's anti free-trade.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

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

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.

I don't want followers.

How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.

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

Sooner or later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous.

Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.

As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.

I don't see any possibility of Britain and the U.S. allowing a sovereign independent Iraq; that's almost inconceivable.

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

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

My proposal happens to be very mainstream.

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

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.

Governments don't control people like they used to.