Quotes by Noam Chomsky
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Ever since I've had any political awareness, I've felt either alone or part of a tiny minority.

Well, they really didn't have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can't do anything. Look, there's one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision-that's the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?

Unless that happens, unless you get, you know, kind of integration of activists' concerns and movements, it will be, each one will be 'preaching to the choir.'

I am not offering this is a critique of the internet, its just that there are a lot of factors involved. It does offer plenty of possibilities. It also has, it can have, a cheapening effect and I think both exist and I think its true of everything. You could say that about the printing press.

The United States is off the international spectrum in religious extremism.

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.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

Trump's principal policies make clear what's going to happen. This gives an opportunity. Right now it's going to take hard work, but it's possible that there could be a real revival of the labor movement.

I still think, despite everything, that the US is very unlikely to attack Iran. It could be a huge catastrophe; nobody knows what the consequences would be. I imagine that only an administration that's really desperate would resort to that.

Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn't survive very long if they did that.

Capitalism would self-destruct in no time. So the business classes have always demanded strong, straight intervention to protect the society from the destructive effects of market forces because they don't want everything destroyed.

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

The US is to an unusual extent a business-run society, where short-term concerns of profit and market share displace rational planning.

Suppose that insect wings developed primarily as thermoregulators and then were used for skimming and finally flying, evolving along the way. What would they be for? Or what is the skeleton for? For keeping one upright, protecting organs, storing calcium, making blood cells...?

Nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think of the United States as an innocent victim only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret.

Small changes can magnifiy. The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.

The printing press had a very liberatory effect that meant individuals -- small groups could produce radical pamphlets -- could use it for organizing.

The American Revolution was a small part of a major world war going on between France and England, so the French intervened and that was a big factor, but the domestic contribution was basically guerrilla warfare.

An unstated but crucial premise is that the responsible men achieve that exalted status by their service to authentic power, a fact of life that they will discover soon enough if they try to pursue an independent path.

In fact, what were called the socialist countries in Eastern Europe were the most anti-socialist systems in the world. Workers had more rights in the United States and England than they had in Russia, and it was somehow still called socialism.

Why not stakeholder action? There's no economic principal that says that management should be responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business economics that they could just as well have a system in which the management is responsible to stakeholders.

Social action must be animated by a vision of a future society, and by explicit judgments of value concerning the character of this future society.

Farming out atrocities to paramilitaries is standard operating procedure.

If commissars in Soviet Russia agreed to subordinate themselves to state power, they could at least plead fear in extenuation. Their counterparts in more free and open societies can plead only cowardice.

I think such an inquiry will reveal a rather different picture: namely, it will reveal a very strong tendency for the intellectuals who are respected and privileged to be those who subordinate themselves to power.

In some ways, the student anti-sweatshop movement is like the anti-apartheid movement, except that in this case its striking at the core of the relations of exploitation. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.

If the principle is, Let's not get lethal substances out to the public, the first one you'd go after is tobacco. The next one you'd go after is alcohol. Way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana.

We could not bring democracy and freedom to Vietnam at a cost acceptable to ourselves. The idea that that was what we were trying to do, is again, a tautology, it's true by definition because we were doing, and the state is noble by definition. That's called extreme liberalism.

The worst drug of all by far is tobacco; the death toll from tobacco is just overwhelming.

Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society. It's also extremely dangerous with all the weapons development.

Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

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.

The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. Straight-out war crime.

In fact, various lawyers' groups -- to some extent in the U.S. but mostly in England and Canada and elsewhere -- are bringing demands for a war crimes trial for the crime of aggression. However, though the invasion of Iraq was plainly an act of aggression, it doesn't break any records.

There is undoubtedly much to learn about the social uses of language, for communication or for other purposes. But at present there is not much in the way of a theory of sociolinguistics, of social uses of languages, as far as I am aware.

I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to educate them to keep them from our throats, to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson's parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education.

'Reform' is a word you always aughta' watch out for. 'Reform' is a change that you're supposed to like. And watch it -- As soon as you hear the word 'Reform', you should reach for your wallet and see who's lifting it.

The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.

In southern culture, possession of a gun became kind of a sign of manhood, not just because of slaves but other white men. If you had a gun, you're not going to push me around. You know, I'm not one of those guys you can kick in the face.

Our crimes, for which we are responsible: as taxpayers, for failing to provide massive reparations, for granting refuge and immunity to the perpetrators, and for allowing the terrible facts to be sunk deep in the memory hole. All of this is of great significance, as it has been in the past.

The people who are unemployed want to do the work, but the system is such a catastrophic failure that it cannot bring together idle hands and work. This is all hailed as a great success, and it is a great success -- for a very small sector of the population.

I wouldn't say that the efforts of academics to critique the media's messages are half-hearted. As far as I am aware, the efforts scarcely exist: very few even pay attention to the question.

Victors do not investigate their own crimes, so that little is known about them.

Don't be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.

What the James Monroe Doctrine stated, in effect, is that the US should dominate the hemisphere.

Expressing criticism of society is not being a grouch.

The US health-care system is a complete scandal. It's got twice the costs of comparable countries and some of the worst outcomes.

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.

Like other organisms, humans have a certain genetic endowment (apparently varying little in the species, not a surprise considering its recent separation from other hominids). That determines what we call their nature.

A lot of countries break (or go against) the international law.

The United States happens to be the only state in the world that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism.

There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism.

A lot of the people involved in the media are very serious, honest people, and they will tell you, and I think they are right, that they are not being forced to write anything.

A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension -- it becomes unconscious and reflexive -- that you just don't think certain things, things that are threatening to power interests.

We had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human nature. If you look at human societies and human interactions, you can find anything. You find selfishness, you find altruism, you find sympathy.

For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect of human nature. And second, I think, it is a good model for studying other human properties, which ought to be studied by psychologists in the same way.

During the 1960s, large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands.... The naive might call that democracy, but that's because they don't understand. The sophisticated understand that that's the crisis of democracy.

The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.

The senate was wealthy people and it wasn't elected, it was chosen through legislatures, which themselves were under private influence, powerful influence. They were remote from the population and that's where power was suppose to reside.

A functioning eco-system is a human need.

Suppose that we believe what we are taught... destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies ... of institutional lunacy.

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.

From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.

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

It is probable that the
most inhuman monsters, even the Himmlers and the Mengeles, convince themselves that they are
engaged in noble and courageous acts.

As long as nuclear weapons exist, the chances of survival of the human species are quite slight.

I think there are all kinds of intrusions into private rights that make use of contemporary technology.

Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature -- what we would call genetically determined.

Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny have created an important political radio show that balances humor and unreported news. At a time when media conglomerates dominate the airwaves, independent media like Citizen Radio is vital to national discourse.

This is real. This is the real mad man theory. We have to be irrational and vindictive, so people don't know what we're up to. This is not Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, it's from the Bill Clinton era.

Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible.

I have never heard of anyone who was a model person in all aspects of his or her life, intellectual life or other aspects; nor do I see why anyone should care. We are not engaged in idol worship, after all.

Human needs are served by a sustainable lifestyle, almost by definition, if humans include coming generations. And a shift to such technologies as high-speed rail instead of maximizing fossil fuel use, and solar energy, is not relentless resource extraction.

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.

Since James Madison day (and long before), there have been constant struggles over democratic governance.

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.

It was right after Woodrow Wilson's first serious post-World War I repression, which deported thousands of people, effectively destroyed unions and independent press, and so on. Right after that, the anti-immigration law was passed that remained in place until the 1960s.

It's a class war, and a war on young people too... that's why tuition is rising so rapidly. There's no real economic reason for that. It's a technique of control and indoctrination. And this is really the first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important.

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination.

Pascal in his bitter rendition of the practices of the Jesuit intellectuals he despised, including their demonstration of the utility of interpretation, a device of manufacturing consent based on reinterpretation of sacred texts to serve wealth, power, and privilege.

Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course;) the US wants to maintain it. An interesting story. There seems to me no easy way out of this.

In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice ... Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin.

In fact, I was in a lab that was a hundred percent funded by the Pentagon, and it was one of the centers of the organized antiwar resistance movement.

Today's Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans a generation ago.

The Irish were treated horribly, even here in Boston. For example, in the late nineteenth century they were treated pretty much like African Americans. You could find signs here in Boston in the restaurants saying No dogs and Irish.

The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.

The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That's never been impossible and never been easy.

If the mutation is partially transmitted to offspring, they too would have the advantage. And over time it might have come to dominate a small breeding group.

Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy.

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

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

The main selling appeal of NAFTA to US corporations is that it gives them an advantage in the North American market over their European and Japanese competitors.

Go back to classical times, say classical Greece. Who drank the hemlock? Was it someone who was conforming, obeying the gods? Or was it someone who was disrupting the youth and questioning the faith and belief? Socrates, in other words. It was Socrates.

ISIS is a monstrosity. It didn't come from nowhere. It's one of the results of the U.S. hitting a very vulnerable society -- Iraq -- with a sledgehammer.

We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.

Academics are not necessarily nice people.

United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that's what it's good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary.

It also seems beyond controversy that moral responsibilities are greater to the extent that people have the resources, the training, the facilities and opportunities to speak and act effectively.