Inspiring Quotes by Noam Chomsky
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We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.

There's plenty of challenging, gratifying, interesting, productive workaround for people to do, and there are plenty of people who want to do it―they simply aren't being allowed that opportunity under the current economic system.

You go into a hospital now, it's dangerous. We can get diseases that can't be dealt with, that are moving around the hospital. A lot of that traces back to industrial meat production. These are really serious threats, all over the place.

What's the point of being better than someone else?

The people I find most impressive are generally unknown at the time of their actions and forgotten in history.

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.

There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of Anglo-Saxon Law. And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.

Nixon at one point informs Kissinger ... that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves ... genocide.

China has been there for 3,000 years, has contempt for the barbarians, is overcoming a century of domination, and simply moves on its own. It does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his fist. That's scary.

During the 1990's, Colombia was the leading recipient of US military aid and training in the hemisphere. Approximately half of all US aid in the hemisphere went to Colombia. Colombia was also far and away the leading human rights violator in the hemisphere.

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.

Colombia is potentially a very wealthy country. It has tremendous resources, but its wealth is highly concentrated. Most of the population lives in misery, which has led to violent confrontation throughout the century.

Colombia has been the leading western recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence has grown through the '90s.

Take Cuba. A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it too. But the government won't allow it.

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

Haiti, which has been the main target of US intervention throughout the 20th century, is the poorest. And Guatemala, which is maybe the third major target of US intervention, probably ranks third poorest.

It turned out that Bill Clinton had authorized Texaco to illegally ship oil to the military junta in Haiti during a time when we were supposedly opposing the military junta and supporting democracy instead.

Iceland is capitalist social democratic, rather like the Nordic countries generally. The capital had a mayor who is an anarchist, but the city has been nothing like that. In fact a few years ago it was super-neoliberal, which led to the crash.

Isn't it interesting that eating a banana is somehow comical.

The missile defense component is a minor feature that nobody takes very seriously. Nobody really believes that the US is trying to protect itself from North Korea. That's not serious. But the militarization of space is quite serious.

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

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

In any case, it is better to have some deal than no deal, but it's interesting that Obama picked the day of implementing of Iran deal to impose new sanctions on North Korea.

If the US were to attack North Korea, they'd certainly destroy North Korea, but South Korea would be pretty well wiped out too.

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

What the polls don't tell you is, though other polls do, is that if you do a study of CEOs, top executives in corporations, they're liberal.

Mexico is a pretty poor country, but they are maintaining a free, high quality public education system, not for everyone of course but pretty substantial.

Travel from what is called Pakistan to Afghanistan has been made increasingly difficult and people are often labelled terrorists, even those who might be just visiting families.

The US intervened in the Philippines to uplift and christianize the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same thing happened with other countries.

Francisco Franco said they should resort to guerrilla war. Which has a history in Spain.

The government of Rwanda, which is a US client, is intervening massively, and Uganda to an extent. It's almost an international war in Africa. Well, how many people know about this?

Around 2008 and again in 2013 NATO officially offered the Ukraine the opportunity to join NATO. That's something no Russian government is ever going to accept. It's right at the geopolitical heartland of Russia.

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category--except for the category of familiarity.

This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars--they would think the country has gone insane.

Latin America is all moving to the left, from Venezuela to Argentina with rare exceptions, but there's a good left and a bad left.

Actually, my first article, it wasn't about the anarchists; it was about the fall of Barcelona and the spread of fascism over Europe, which was frightening. But a couple of years later I became interested in the anarchist movement.

Quite generally, international affairs have more than a slight resemblance to the Mafia. The Godfather does not take it lightly when he is crossed, even by a small storekeeper.

Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.

It is quite possible -- overwhelmingly probable, one might guess -- that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.

International relations bears more than a slight resemblance to the mafia.

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they're being objective.

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.

We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.

Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy -- their own population.

Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.

It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.

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

The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.

He who controls the media controls the minds of the public.

Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.

How it is we have so much information, but know so little?

If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.

From anti-semite to self-hating jew, all in one day.

What right does the US have to do anything in Colombia? Does Colombia have the right to bomb North Carolina? There are more Colombians dying from tobacco than Americans dying from heroin.

About half the population thinks that every person in Congress, including their own representative, should be thrown out. That's the center not holding.

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

Peace is preferable to war. But it's not an absolute value, and so we always ask, What kind of peace?

If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence.

Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?

Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

The first scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone. It was not an easy task. There was no good text available.

In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as 'failed states.'

It makes sense for Japan to pursue a more independent role in the world, following Latin America and others in freeing itself from U.S. domination.

Armed attack has a definition in international law. It means sudden, overwhelming, instantaneous ongoing attack.

I didn't pay my taxes for years.

Government actually grew during the Reagan years.

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

Obama, of course, outspent McCain.

The U.S. is just in a class by itself in military expenses. It basically matches the rest of the world, and it's far more advanced.

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It's not like Egypt, where you're going to get murdered by the security forces.

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.

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

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

An individual's refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

The U.S. has strategic and economic interests in Southeast Asia that must be secured. Holding Indochina is essential to securing these interests. Therefore, we must hold Indochina.

U.S. analysts estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted reaction to the Bush administration's militancy and aggressiveness.

Violence can succeed, as Americans know well from the conquest of the national territory. But at terrible cost. It can also provoke violence in response, and often does.

The appropriate response to terrorist crimes is police work, which has been successful worldwide.

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

There was unprecedented elite condemnation of the plans to invade Iraq. Sensible analysts were able to perceive that the enterprise carried significant risks for U.S. interests, however conceived.

There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication.

The American claim that the bombing of North Vietnam was directed against military targets does not withstand direct investigation.

Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.