Noam Chomsky Quotes

Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: What kind of peace?

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy.

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

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

all sorts of considerations determine the truth conditions of a statement, and these go well beyond the scope of grammar.

[ ... ] dictatorship, the most extreme form of tyranny, can never lead to social liberation.

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

I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

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

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

Control is the source of strategic power.

On almost all issues, citizens could not identify the stands of the candidates
as intended.

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

Mr. Mijanovi and those associated with him are the hope and the conscience of the Yugoslav revolution.

I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.

Pre-emptive war might fall within the framework of international law.

Chinese military spending is carefully monitored by the United States.

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors.

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

The United States happens to be the only state in the world that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism.

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.

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

The childcare tax credit makes some sense.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

Governments are supposed to lie to their citizens.

The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.

Social action must be animated by a vision of a future society, and by explicit judgments of value concerning the character of this future society.

Free markets are based on the free circulation of labor. If you don't have free circulation of labor, you don't have free markets.

There is no demonstration against Zionism, because even the European Parliament regards such a demonstration as anti-Semitic.

Ever since I've had any political awareness, I've felt either alone or part of a tiny minority.

Even Stalin proclaimed his love for democracy. We do not learn about the nature of systems of power by listening to their rhetoric.

The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.

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

Alleged commitment to democracy and human rights is mere rhetoric, directly contrary to actual policy.

Corporations with their political allies are waging an unrelenting class war against working people.

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

The country was founded on the principle that primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet's corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

the way they put it, we as a society have decided not to modify the society but to modify the children.

Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It's minuscule, few percent.

Classical liberalism was wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, but

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

The worst terrorist crimes going on right now are the drone campaigns.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

A siege is an act of war.

The best defense against democracy is to distract people.

The atrocities in Cambodia are a direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system.

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

Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.

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

The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. Straight-out war crime.

Any attempt to solve a conflict has to touch upon its very core; the core, more often than not, lies in its history.

WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for - presidential medal of honor.

I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

If you're in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.

There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism.

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

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.

Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, is moving towards a degree of independence.

Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.

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

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

The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

Pakistan is not a unified country.

Advertising is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled.

Remember, weapons of mass destruction don't mean missiles.

Occasionally the conflict between 'what we stand for' and 'what we do' has been forthrightly addressed.

The point of advertising is to destroy markets.

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

Not all evils can be rectified, but ongoing evils surely should stop.

I'm into eating as little as possible ... I never cook. Never use the stove or anything.

I do not feel that we should set up people as "models"; rather actions, thoughts, principles.

The principle of universality is not a 'theory'. Just moral truism.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.

It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.

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

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

We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid.

The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.

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

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

NATO's essentially run by the United States.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

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

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

Everyone's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's really an easy way: Stop participating in it.

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

Small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences. [Source: Al Jazeera 'Upfront' interview]

As long as each individual is facing the television tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege

I would appear on Fox News more easily than I would NPR.

The U.S. and its allies will do anything they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world.

These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies.

If a concept or principle finds its place in an explanatory theory, it cannot be excluded on methodological grounds.

The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.