Quotes by Noam Chomsky
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For many of the world's conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement.

If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions.

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act.

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

My speculation is that the U.S. does not want to establish the principle that it has to defer to some higher authority before carrying out the use of violence.

Right after 9-11, as far as I know, one newspaper in the United States had the integrity to investigate opinion in the Muslim world: the 'Wall Street Journal.'

Control is the source of strategic power.

In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, '69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it's worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started -- an outright war started in 1962.

I have been -- I have spoken in Bir Zeit a number of times.

Egypt is the second-largest recipient over a long period of U.S. military and economic aid. Israel is first.

When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that's been going on since the Second World War.

By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti.

What's important in Libya is, first of all, it has a good deal of oil. A lot of the country is unexplored; there may be a lot more. And it's very high-quality oil, so very valuable.

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison -- they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

The childcare tax credit makes some sense.

If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself.

Israel is a pretty crazy state.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s -- the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.

I don't pay a lot of attention to polls.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing.

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.

I know some really outstanding Turkish journalists, and have been pleased and honored to be able to join with them a few times in their courageous protests against state terror and repression.

As for my own views, they've of course evolved over the years. This conception of 'renouncing beliefs' is very odd, as if we're in some kind of religious cult. I 'renounce beliefs' practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes... to an extent, that's true elsewhere, including the United States, but it's been pretty extreme in Greece.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn't picked me up.

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

To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use -- a cynic might say that this is why they continue to exist.

Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.

The whole infrastructure of air travel was, and is, part of government policy. It is not a natural development of a free economic system -- at least not in the way that is claimed. The same is true of the roads, of course.

Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.

Part of the population of Laos lives in urban centers, Vientiane being the largest.

U.S. Government propaganda tries to give the impression that aerial bombardment achieves near-surgical accuracy, so that military targets can be destroyed with minimal effect on civilians. Technical documents give a different picture.

In the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students.

Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.

Occupying armies have responsibilities, not rights. Their primary responsibility is to withdraw as quickly and expeditiously as possible, in a manner determined by the occupied population.

In November 2007, the White House issued a Declaration of Principles demanding that U.S. forces must remain indefinitely in Iraq and committing Iraq to privilege American investors.

In 1949, China declared independence -- an event known in Western discourse as 'the loss of China' in the U.S. -- with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss.

The western mantra is that Israel seeks negotiations without preconditions, while the Palestinians refuse. The opposite is more accurate.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

Israelis would mostly breathe a sigh of relief if Palestinians were to disappear.

When Rumsfeld gets up on television and says we have definitive intelligence that al Qaeda is working with Iraq, how is an ordinary citizen supposed to react? They won't tell you the evidence, and when anyone asks, they say, 'Well, you know: It's secret.'

Cuba has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since 1959, Cuba has been under attack from the hemispheric superpower.

One of the problems of organizing in the North, in the rich countries, is that people tend to think -- even the activists -- that instant gratification is required. You constantly hear: 'Look I went to a demonstration, and we didn't stop the war so what's the use of doing it again?'

The Occupy movement is -- it was a big surprise.

After my first year of college, each course I took in every field was so boring that I didn't even go to the classes.

In 1963, the U.N. Security Council declared a voluntary arms embargo on South Africa. That was extended to a mandatory embargo in 1977. And that was followed by economic sanctions and other measures -- sometimes officials, countries, cities, towns -- some organized by popular movements.

The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it's likely to harm them.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can't compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan's free market enthusiasms.

There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office -- anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal.

In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.

When secular figures are turned into divinities, they way they are in Peian Yang or Stanford University -- that I don't like.

Meteorologists are pretty faces reading scripts telling you whether it's going to rain tomorrow.

If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.

If you're working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.

When I look at public opinion, I'm not far out of the mainstream. I'm in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I've ever said.

My proposal happens to be very mainstream.

If you want to achieve something, you build the basis for it.

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

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

I don't usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this 'hopey changey stuff,' she was right: there was nothing there.

In Latin America, specialists and polling organisations have, for some time, observed that the extension of formal democracy was accompanied by an increasing disillusionment about democracy and a lack of faith in democratic institutions.

The country that consistently ranks among the highest in educational achievement is Finland. A rich country, but education is free. Germany, education is free. France, education is free.

The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.

Civil disobedience is -- it's no fun.

There are nuclear-weapons-free zones in several parts of the world already, except that they're not implemented fully, because the U.S. won't allow it.

Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.

The 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws.

I don't think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state.

Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Guantanamo is still open, but it's unlikely that serious torture is going on at Guantanamo. There is just too much inspection.

If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be... a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.

Israel is following policies which maximise its security threats... policies which choose expansion over security... policies which lead to their moral degradation, their isolation, their delegitimation, as they call it now, and very likely ultimate destruction. That's not impossible.

I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.

The 'peace movement' exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.

Even the most cynical can hardly be surprised by the antics of Nixon and his accomplices as they are gradually revealed. It matters little, at this point, where the exact truth lies in the maze of perjury, evasion, and of contempt for the normal -- hardly inspiring -- standards of political conduct.

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of 'humanitarian intervention,' to use the currently fashionable phrase.

The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.

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.

The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers.

Unlike Europe, China can't be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they've been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don't see any need to.

The U.S. is off the spectrum in religious commitment.

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.

The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.

The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.

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.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can't explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

It could be -- and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don't like it -- that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.