Chomsky Quotes

“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.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation.

Now, it's long been understood very well that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited: that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage-can. At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community-interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others; or, alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control.

As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole and, by now, that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass-communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely, to impose necessary illusions, manipulate and deceive the stupid majority, and remove them from the public arena. The question, in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“How, then, does one become an activist?

The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. We all want to give more than to receive. We all want to live in a world where solidarity and companionship are more important values than individualism and selfishness. We all want to share beautiful things; experience joy, laughter, love; and experiment, together.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“Chomsky's writings are 'classics' in Mark Twain's sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“They have the same point of view. The two parties are two factions of the business party. Most of the population doesn't even bother voting because it looks meaningless. They're marginalized and properly distracted. At least that's the goal.”
― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda

“Corporations with their political allies are waging an unrelenting class war against working people.”
― Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian

“I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors [...] 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. And it was understood by the people who run the political system, and so it's no great secret that the US electoral system is mainly a public relations extravaganza...it's sort of a marketing affair.”
― Noam Chomsky

“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.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If you're independent-minded in school, you're probably going to get in trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's being preferred or cultivated.”
― Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian

“The hypothesis advanced by the propaganda model, excluded from debate as unthinkable, is that in dealing with the American wars in Indochina, the media were "unmindful", but highly "patriotic" in the special and misleading sense that they kept -- and keep -- closely to the perspective of official Washington and the closely related corporate elite, in conformity to the general "journalistic-literary-political culture" from which "the left" (meaning dissident opinion that questions jingoist assumptions) is virtually excluded. The propaganda model predicts that this should be generally true not only of the choice of topics covered and the way they are covered, but also, and far more crucially, of the general background of the presuppositions within which the issues are framed and the news presented. Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected within the media, which in this narrow sense, may adopt an "adversarial stance" with regard to those holding office, reflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways. Even when large parts of the general public break free of the premises of the doctrinal system, as finally happened during the Indochina wars, real understanding based upon an alternative conception of the evolving history can be developed only with considerable effort by the most diligent and skeptical. And such understanding as can be reached through serious and often individual effort will be difficult to sustain or apply elsewhere, an extremely important matter for those who are truly concerned with democracy at home and "the influence of democracy abroad," in the real sense of these words.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“Our philosophy is to rob everything as much as possible and forget about tomorrow...But it makes a certain sense if the sole human value is making as much wealth as you can tomorrow. You don't care what happens down the road and you don't care what happens to anybody else. It makes perfect sense. If it destroys the world, well, it's not my problem.”
― Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian

“In fact, most of what they're calling crime is a kid caught with a joint in his pocket. Why do people think of that as the problem?”
― Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian

“The powerful are self-immunized from even inquiry, let alone punishment for their crimes.”
― Noam Chomsky, Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe

“The people who call themselves conservatives say, 'We have to maintain family values by preventing women from having a choice as to whether they will have children, and then by not giving them any support when they have to take care of their children. That's how we preserve family values.' The internal contradictions are amazing.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Take Ron Paul. He appeals to a lot of progressives. He said on Fox, 'The greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming.' He doesn't provide any argument or evidence as to why he disregards the scientific consensus--just, I say so, period. With that attitude, you really are approaching the edge.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“The Republican Party today has a catechism. If you want to be a candidate, with very rare exceptions, you have to repeat the catechism in lockstep uniformity: global warming isn't happening, no taxes on the rich. There are about ten things that you have to repeat, whether you believe them or not. Anybody who departs from them is in trouble.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Rand Paul...said national health insurance is slavery. He said, I'm a physician, and if there's national health insurance, the government is forcing me to take care of somebody who is ill. Why should I be a slave to the state? Here we're getting capitalist pathology in its most extreme, lunatic form. It is the opposite of solidarity, mutual support, mutual help.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“[W]e have a democracy that uses free elections to put in place known obstructionists, and a media that disproportionately gives a forum to economically driven ideology over sound science.”
― Noam Chomsky, Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe

“When understanding fails, there is always more force in reserve. As the "experiments in material and human resources control" collapse and "revolutionary development" grinds to a halt, we simply resort more openly to the Gestapo tactics that are barely concealed behind the facade of pacification. When American cities explode, we can expect the same. The technique of "limited warfare" translates neatly into a system of domestic repression - far more humane, as will quickly be explained, than massacring those who are unwilling to wait for the inevitable victory of the war on poverty. Why should a liberal intellectual be so persuaded of the virtues of a political system of four-year dictatorship? The answer seem all to plain.”
― Noam Chomsky, Chomsky On Anarchism

“How is it that you can read this book? An obvious answer is because you know English. An equally obvious answer is because the light is on. These two explanations for an apparently trivial ability can illuminate a fundamental dichotomy: the difference between our knowledge of language and our use of that knowledge; between our competence and our performance. Your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary of English, your competence as a speaker of English, is prerequisite to your understanding this sentence; the exercise of this competence is made possible by the fact, among many others, that the light is on.”
― Neilson Voyne Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals

“He wants to focus on what he calls 'cultural issues.' That makes sense, because when you're going to rob people blind you don't want to have them focus their attention on economic issues.”
― Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian

“There is tons of work to be done, and lots of people who would like to do the work. It's just that the economic system is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can't even put together idle hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and which would be beneficial to all of us. That's just the mark of a failed system. The most dramatic mark of it.”
― Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
three old owls on a chest of drawers
were screwing
the daughter of the doctor.
But then the mother called them,
colorless green ideas slepp furiously.”
― Umberto Eco, How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays

“Part of the doctrinal system in the United States is the pretense that we're all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that's radically false.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“About half the population thinks that every person in Congress, including their own representative, should be thrown out. That's the center not holding.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it's maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You're not supposed to say this. It's considered a conspiracy theory.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“In the succeeding thirty-two years of U.S. guidance, not only has Guatemala gradually become a terrorist state rarely matched in the scale of systematic murder of civilians, but its terrorist proclivities have increased markedly at strategic moments of escalated U.S. intervention. The first point was the invasion and counterrevolution of 1954, which reintroduced political murder and large-scale repression to Guatemala following the decade of democracy. The second followed the emergence of a small guerrilla movement in the early 1960s, when the United States began serious counterinsurgency (CI) training of the Guatemalan army. In 1966, a further small guerrilla movement brought the Green Berets and a major CI war in which 10,000 people were killed in pursuit of three or four hundred guerrillas. It was at this point that the "death squads" and "disappearances" made their appearance in Guatemala. The United States brought in police training in the 1970s, which was followed by the further institutionalization of violence. The "solution" to social problems in Guatemala, specifically attributable to the 1954 intervention and the form of U.S. assistance since that time, has been permanent state terror. With Guatemala, the United States invented the "counterinsurgency state.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“the ones who are running the world economy have protected themselves very strongly from market discipline. the neo-liberal system is an attack, in my view, both on the market, and on democracy.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Darwin asked rhetorically why “thought, being a secretion of the brain,” should be considered “more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter.”
― Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind