Top 1898 Quotes & Sayings by Noam Chomsky
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American activist Noam Chomsky.
Last updated on September 11, 2024.
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.
It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.
The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.
The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.
In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers, but not against the United States.
With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.
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.
I would appear on Fox News more easily than I would NPR.
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
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.
There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.
It is pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advanced' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.
Today, we have private airline companies, but if you take a look at a Boeing plane next time you travel, you'll see that you are basically taking a ride on a modified bomber.
The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.
There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.
If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health.
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
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.
International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn't pay his protection money. You have to have obedience; otherwise, the idea can spread that you don't have to listen to the orders, and it can spread to important places.
The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.
The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.
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.
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
In ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.
The 'peace movement' exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.
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.
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.
NATO's essentially run by the United States.
Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.
The U.S. has the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world, has about twice the per capita costs, and some of the worst outcomes. It's also the only privatized system.
Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.
There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.
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.
If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.
In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.
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.
Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.
Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.
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.
Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.
It's dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy.
Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It's a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can't get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt, it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy.
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
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?
Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.
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 more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders.
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