Quotes by Noam Chomsky
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Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information. You expect to see delusion and imagery.

The Federal Reserve has an official commitment to two different policies. One is to prevent inflation from getting too high. The second is to maintain high employment... the European Central Bank has only the first. It has no commitment to keep employment up.

Real popular culture is folk art -- coalminers' songs and so forth.

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

Some international law specialists compare the invasion of Iraq to the 'crimes against the peace' for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

I don't have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

To summarize, draft resistance can make use of the inegalitarian nature of American society as a technique for increasing the cost of American aggression, and it threatens values that are important to those in a decision-making position.

Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first place.

Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: 'What is the scientific status of the claims?' 'What social or ideological needs do they serve?'

There is no plausible theory under which the record of the Pentagon Papers can be interpreted as relating to the national defense.

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since.

If you destroyed half the pharmaceutical production in the United States, we'd think it's a pretty serious problem. In fact, we'd probably go to war.

The Vietnamese see their history as an unending series of struggles of resistance to aggression, by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the French, and now the Americans.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy's finest hour.

In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it.

I've been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan's vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.

Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on.

No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it's a major problem, that's just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it.

The list of U.S. vetoes at the Security Council to protect Israeli aggression and occupation is huge.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be -- protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

Dissident intellectuals aren't all beautiful.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors.

I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system.

In Egypt, on the eve of Tahrir Square, there was a major poll which found that overwhelmingly -- 80-90%, numbers like that -- Egyptians regarded the main threats they face as the U.S. and Israel. They don't like Iran -- Arabs generally don't like Iran -- but they didn't consider it a threat.

Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free.

I haven't read Horowitz. I didn't used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don't read him today.

If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.

Governments don't control people like they used to.

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

In September 1993, President Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn -- the climax of a 'day of awe,' as the press described it.

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.

It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.

The public is strongly in favor of the Kyoto Protocols, so strongly in favor that a majority of Bush voters thought that he was in favor of it. They are simply unaware.

The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials -- literally, which is why I'm teaching at MIT.

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

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.

The 'anti-globalisation movement' is the most significant proponent of globalisation -- but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.

I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven -- that's none of my business, ultimately. I won't lecture her on the philosophy of science.

People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You're a traitor.

As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.

My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression -- thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people -- along with despair about its future.

Thanh Hoa itself is a rich agricultural province. Rice fields, a pattern of many shades of green, stretch far into the distance along the road, which also winds through foothills and the fringes of heavy jungle where tigers are said to roam. The vegetation, wild or cultivated, is lush.

There is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.

When a politician uses the word 'folks,' we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn't producing any more.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.

The Oslo Accords in 1993 determined that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are a single territorial entity which cannot be divided. Immediately, the United States and Israel set about separating the two and making sure that they would not be united.

NATO was constructed on the -- with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?

If you're in favour of any policy -- reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever -- if you're at least minimally moral, it's because you think it's somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

I'm about as monolingual as you come, but nevertheless, I have a variety of different languages at my command, different styles, different ways of talking, which do involve different parameter settings.

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

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

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa's major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

Turkey must find its place if, of course, it can heal its internal sores, and none is more malignant than the perennial Kurdish issue.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

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

A tremendous amount of the entrepreneurial initiative, if you want to call it that, comes from the dynamic state sector on which most of the economy relies to socialize costs and risks and privatize eventual profit. And that's achieved by, if you like, advertising.

For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.

Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.

The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.

The term 'globalisation' is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by 'sophisticated' methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.

If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in U.S. industry, even more than elsewhere, there's layer after layer of management -- a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities.

After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organised a People's Summit with 35,000 participants from 140 countries -- not just representatives of governments, but also civil society and activists.

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don't just succumb.

The Republican Party has become overwhelmingly so extreme that it's hardly a traditional political party anymore.

As international support for Obama's decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world.

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued -- they may be essential to survival.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

Social Security is based on a principle. It's based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat.

Pakistan is not a unified country.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

It is easier to go to the Internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But the shift from no libraries to the existence of libraries was a much greater shift than what we've seen with the Internet's development.

Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.

I don't see anything that's come out on WikiLeaks that was a legitimate secret.

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

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