110+ Noam Chomsky's Profound Quotes on Language, Politics, and Philosophy

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. He is an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has worked since 1955. He is well known for his criticism of US foreign policy and US media, as well as his theories of language and mind. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Noam Chomsky on language, education, politics.

Top 10 Noam Chomsky Quotes

1. Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can't afford the time to think.
2. That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.
3. Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.
4. Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.
5. Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.
6. There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.
7. The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.
8. A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.
9. If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
10. 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.

Noam Chomsky Image Quotes

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies. — Noam Chomsky

We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas. — Noam Chomsky

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

Education is a system of imposed ignorance. — Noam Chomsky

He who controls the media controls the minds of the public. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Short Quotes

• If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
• We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
• You are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions.
• The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
• Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.
• Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?
• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
• Labor #‎ Unions are the leading force for #‎ democratization and #‎ progress .
• Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

Noam Chomsky Quotes About Language

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. — Noam Chomsky

The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that's not just true of languages. It's true of every subject. — Noam Chomsky

The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately UNDERSTOOD by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar. — Noam Chomsky

Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals. — Noam Chomsky

Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow. — Noam Chomsky

For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect of human nature. And second, I think, it is a good model for studying other human properties, which ought to be studied by psychologists in the same way. — Noam Chomsky

There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind — Noam Chomsky

I think a very important aspect of language has to do with the establishment of social relations and interactions. Often, this is described as communication. But that is very misleading, I think. — Noam Chomsky

If we understood, as we do not, the physical bases for intellectual structures, I have little doubt that we would find structures in the brain for social interactions, or language, or analysis of personality - a whole variety of systems developed on the basis of a specific biological endowment. — Noam Chomsky

It's true that language is in a sense linear but that is as obvious as perceptual space is three-dimensional. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About Education

The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions. — Noam Chomsky

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Noam Chomsky

Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely. — Noam Chomsky

Education is a system of imposed ignorance. — Noam Chomsky

There is a social responsibility to take care of vulnerable people. It seems that a sensible social responsibility is obligatory education, but also decent education, and that is not happening. — Noam Chomsky

State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day. — Noam Chomsky

Millions of people are getting the vote, and we have to educate them to keep them from our throats. In other words, we have to train them in obedience and servility, so they're not going to think through the way the world works and come after our throats. — Noam Chomsky

Mexico is a pretty poor country, but they are maintaining a free, high quality public education system, not for everyone of course but pretty substantial. — Noam Chomsky

I had two spinster aunts who were seamstresses, and of course unemployed in the 1930s, but the union gave them a life. They had a couple of weeks in the country for a union installation and they had educational programs and all sorts of things. There was a life, you know, a real community. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About Politics

It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism. — Noam Chomsky

Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves. — Noam Chomsky

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

Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve. — Noam Chomsky

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

The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information. — Noam Chomsky

During the 1960s, large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands.... The naive might call that democracy, but that's because they don't understand. The sophisticated understand that that's the crisis of democracy. — Noam Chomsky

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

It is familiar to mainstream academic scholarship. One very prominent political scientist, in his standard text American Politics 20 years ago, observes that "The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen." — Noam Chomsky

In the years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about 1.5 million people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Forget what was happening in South Africa and Namibia. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About Democracy

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations. — Noam Chomsky

Under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. — Noam Chomsky

Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy. — Noam Chomsky

People don't talk to each other. You're alone with your television set or internet. But you can't have a functioning democracy without what sociologists call "secondary organizations," places where people can get together, plan, talk and develop ideas. You don't do it alone. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Noam Chomsky

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy. — Noam Chomsky

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

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. — Noam Chomsky

The answer to subversion of democracy is more democracy, more freedom, more justice. — Noam Chomsky

So yes in theory there is a kind of a formal democracy and in many ways these were achievements and an improvement over the feudal system and more advanced than anything else in the world, but nothing that we ought to call democracy. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About Capitalism

Iceland is capitalist social democratic, rather like the Nordic countries generally. The capital had a mayor who is an anarchist, but the city has been nothing like that. In fact a few years ago it was super-neoliberal, which led to the crash. — Noam Chomsky

We had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human nature. If you look at human societies and human interactions, you can find anything. You find selfishness, you find altruism, you find sympathy. — Noam Chomsky

Capitalism’s concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is anti-human and intolerable in the deepest sense — Noam Chomsky

In a society that has very high concentration of capital in a narrow sector of the population, that's going to influence everything in different ways. — Noam Chomsky

As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed. — Noam Chomsky

Capitalism would self-destruct in no time. So the business classes have always demanded strong, straight intervention to protect the society from the destructive effects of market forces because they don't want everything destroyed. — Noam Chomsky

Half the population hold that the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves, as polls regularly show. — Noam Chomsky

Borders are semiporous. Capital flows more freely than people across them. on C Span. — Noam Chomsky

A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized. — Noam Chomsky

Capitalism denies the right to live. You have only the right to remain on the labour market. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About Life

To live a life of honesty and integrity is a responsibility of every decent person. — Noam Chomsky

I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. — Noam Chomsky

I have never heard of anyone who was a "model person" in all aspects of his or her life, intellectual life or other aspects; nor do I see why anyone should care. We are not engaged in idol worship, after all. — Noam Chomsky

An unstated but crucial premise is that the "responsible men" achieve that exalted status by their service to authentic power, a fact of life that they will discover soon enough if they try to pursue an independent path. — Noam Chomsky

When I was growing up in the 1930s and '40s anti-Semitism was rampant. It wasn't like Nazi Germany but it was pretty serious - it was part of life. — Noam Chomsky

The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there's something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Noam Chomsky

I've often been struck by the extensive knowledge that people have of sports, and particularly, their self-confidence in discussing it with experts. . . . In contrast, when discussing matters of concern to human lives - their own and others - people tend to defer to experts. — Noam Chomsky

The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined. — Noam Chomsky

The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren't being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About Critical

The corporations plainly want academic scholarship to create a web of mystification that will avoid any public awareness of the way in which power actually functions in the society, and the faculty has caught the message and they do it magnificently. — Noam Chomsky

Expressing criticism of society is not being a grouch. — Noam Chomsky

Some [people] may be "servants of the power structure," but that has to be shown. I think it often can be shown, but the burden of proof is on the critic who puts forth that thesis in particular cases. — Noam Chomsky

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

After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the 'sense of utter irresponsibility' shown by the demonstrators. — Noam Chomsky

It's fine to criticize somebody else's crimes and misdeeds, but you don't talk about your own. The only exception is a country that is defeated. And even that is rather nuanced. — Noam Chomsky

A large part of the left is pro-Assad. In those circles, you can't criticize Assad, but you know he's a monstrous war criminal. And anyone who criticizes Assad is joining the US imperialists. That's just ludicrous. — Noam Chomsky

What's called "liberal" in the intelectual culture means highly conformist to power, but mildly critical. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About System

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

Small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Noam Chomsky

With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased. — Noam Chomsky

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

Should we even have the classification system? Why shouldn't these things be open? There are things you want to keep secret, like the characteristics of your latest fighter plane or something like that. — Noam Chomsky

Why not stakeholder action? There's no economic principal that says that management should be responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business economics that they could just as well have a system in which the management is responsible to stakeholders. — Noam Chomsky

A default of the US government would not only be very harmful here, it would probably send the country back into deep recession, but it just might crash the international financial system. — Noam Chomsky

It [the internet] should be publicly controlled but Washington is not a system of public control, it's mainly a system of corporate control. We ought to have a free internet, but that means having a free society, and there is fundamental questions there. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About People

The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can't go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who's sniffing cocaine. — Noam Chomsky

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies. — Noam Chomsky

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people. — Noam Chomsky

It’s 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. — Noam Chomsky

People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Noam Chomsky

The term "intellectual" is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility. — Noam Chomsky

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Noam Chomsky

If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you're doing something wrong. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About Industrial

Stakeholders - meaning workers and community - the CEO could just as well be responsible to them. This presupposes there ought to be management but why does there have to be management? Why not have the stakeholders run the industry? — Noam Chomsky

Bear in mind that we [ with Edward Herman] did not devise the terms "manufacture of consent" and "engineering of consent." We borrowed them from leading figures in the media, public relations industry, and academic scholarship. — Noam Chomsky

Enormous and growing parts of the population are basically superfluous for profit-making purposes. Along with this, the jail population is increasing very rapidly; it's the highest in the industrial world by far. New and onerous crime bills are being passed to deal with this superfluous population. — Noam Chomsky

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays. — Noam Chomsky

Silicon Valley benefits, as all of industry, from highly protectionist policy - patent policies and things like that - which come out of the government. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Noam Chomsky

The U.S. is different from Europe and other industrial countries. — Noam Chomsky

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control -- indoctrination, we might say -- exercised through the mass media. — Noam Chomsky

The development of space technology, including space warfare today, is similar in its technological-industrial significance to the development of navies a hundred years ago. — Noam Chomsky

Industrial production of meat makes a huge contribution to global warming. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About Control

He who controls the media controls the minds of the public. — Noam Chomsky

Some kind of settlement in Kashmir is crucial for both India and Pakistan. It's also tearing India apart with horrible atrocities in the region which is controlled by Indian armed forces. This is feeding right back into society even in the domain of elementary civil rights. — Noam Chomsky

Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn't communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives? — Noam Chomsky

Modern science and technology can relieve men of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it. — Noam Chomsky

Some kind of settlement in Kashmir is crucial for both countries [Pakistan and India]. It's also tearing India apart with horrible atrocities in the region which is controlled by Indian armed forces. — Noam Chomsky

As the capacity to coerce declines, it is natural to turn to control of opinion as the basis for authority and domination - a fundamental principle of government already emphasized by David Hume. — Noam Chomsky

It's a class war, and a war on young people too... that's why tuition is rising so rapidly. There's no real economic reason for that. It's a technique of control and indoctrination. And this is really the first organized, significant reaction to it, which is important. — Noam Chomsky

You have to love that government, but hate the government that might work in your interest and that you could control. That's an interesting propaganda task, but it's been carried out very well. — Noam Chomsky

If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of control, then your world's gone. Like some unusual child who has a million toys and one of them is stolen, he's going to perish. — Noam Chomsky

This is class war on an international scale, and power is in the hands of those who control the international economic system. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes About States

It’s a shameful moment for U.S. media when it insists on being subservient to the grotesque propaganda agencies of a violent, aggressive state. — Noam Chomsky

One of the greatest dangers is secular religion - state worship. — Noam Chomsky

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

My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state... It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century. — Noam Chomsky

Remember, the U.S. is a powerful state, it's not like Libya. If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The United States hires terrorist states. — Noam Chomsky

It's quite extraordinary to hear a supposedly learned person call the United States a leading terrorist nation, one of the leading terrorist nations in the world. It's false and very treacherous teaching. — Noam Chomsky

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible. — Noam Chomsky

For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade. — Noam Chomsky

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college. — Noam Chomsky

Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That’s just fine. It’s just the poor who aren’t supposed to cooperate. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Famous Quotes And Sayings

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome. — Noam Chomsky

If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time. — Noam Chomsky

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies. — Noam Chomsky

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Noam Chomsky

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. — Noam Chomsky

I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. — Noam Chomsky

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

Education is a system of imposed ignorance. — Noam Chomsky

Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army and calls it a war. — Noam Chomsky

He who controls the media controls the minds of the public. — Noam Chomsky

Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal — Noam Chomsky

All public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they can survive in the labor market, fine. Otherwise, they die. That's economics in a nutshell. — Noam Chomsky

A captured pirate was brought before Alexander the Great. “How dare you molest the sea?” asked Alexander. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replied, and continued: “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor. — Noam Chomsky

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself. — Noam Chomsky

What is called 'capitalism'is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close cooperation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society. — Noam Chomsky

If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it. — Noam Chomsky

Hillary Clinton was the one pressing the hardest for bombing, and look at what happened. They not only destroyed the country, but Libya has become the center for jihad all over Africa and the Middle East. It's a total disaster in every respect, but it does not matter. Look at the so-called global war on terror. — Noam Chomsky

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so. — Noam Chomsky

Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations. — Noam Chomsky

If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Noam Chomsky

ISIS is a monstrosity. It didn't come from nowhere. It's one of the results of the U.S. hitting a very vulnerable society - Iraq - with a sledgehammer. — Noam Chomsky

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

The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have. — Noam Chomsky

Anyone who studies declassified documents soon becomes aware that government secrecy is largely an effort to protect policy makers from scrutiny by citizens, not to protect the country from enemies. — Noam Chomsky

All forms of involuntary servitude are prohibited, not only slavery but also conscription, forced association, and forced welfare distribution. — Noam Chomsky

Take like, say, Obama, he's called "liberal" and he's praised for his "principled objection to the Iraq war". What was his "principled objection"? He says it was a "strategic blunder," like Nazi generals after Stalingrad. — Noam Chomsky

It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them. — Noam Chomsky

I have no Facebook page or Twitter - I don't participate in it, and I don't like it particularly. I mean, it's a form of interaction, which strikes me as extremely superficial. — Noam Chomsky

The general public are not even aware of major decisions that will determine their fate, hence are in no position to influence them — Noam Chomsky

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. — Noam Chomsky

There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known, it's called sugar. . . . The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans. — Noam Chomsky

That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. — Noam Chomsky

We're supposed to believe that oil had nothing to do with it, that if Iraq were exporting pickles or jelly and the center of world oil production were in the South Pacific that the United States would've liberated them anyway. It has nothing to do with the oil, what a crass idea. Anyone with their head screwed on knows that that can't be true. — Noam Chomsky

We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on. — Noam Chomsky

In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice . . . Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin. — Noam Chomsky

My linguistics is pretty theoretical. — Noam Chomsky

Ontological questions are generally beside the point, hardly more than a form of harassment. — Noam Chomsky

Suppose that, say, China established military bases in Colombia to carry out chemical warfare in Kentucky and North Carolina to destroy this lethal crop [tobacco] that is killing huge numbers of Chinese. — Noam Chomsky

Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place — Noam Chomsky

Power has to be protected from scrutiny. That's the principle of every dictatorship, of every autocracy. You hear it from high priests at Harvard and every government department, that power has to be kept secret otherwise it will fade and it won't work. But Bradley Manning is violating that principle. — Noam Chomsky

Its true that contemporary technology permits decentralization, it also permits centralization. It depends on how you use the technology. — Noam Chomsky

The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable - if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it. — Noam Chomsky

There’s no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Genghis Khan. — Noam Chomsky

The people I find most impressive are generally unknown at the time of their actions and forgotten in history. — Noam Chomsky

It hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison. — Noam Chomsky

The responsibilities of someone in a more free and open society are, again obviously, greater than those who may pay some cost for honesty and integrity. — Noam Chomsky

I like the cold weather. It means you get work done. — Noam Chomsky

It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence — Noam Chomsky

Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things. Noam Chomsky — Noam Chomsky

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.... — Noam Chomsky

Life Lessons by Noam Chomsky

1. Noam Chomsky has taught us the importance of standing up for what is right, no matter how difficult it may be. He has shown us that it is possible to make a difference in the world through activism and education.
2. He has also shown us the power of critical thinking and questioning authority, and that it is important to question the status quo and challenge the status quo in order to create a better future.
3. Finally, he has taught us the importance of having a strong moral compass and staying true to our values, even in the face of adversity.