Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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.”

— Noam Chomsky

Featured in: Communication Quotes

4. “The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.”

— Noam Chomsky

5. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

— Noam Chomsky

6. “You are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions.”

— Noam Chomsky

7. “Education is a system of imposed ignorance.”

— Noam Chomsky

8. “He who controls the media controls the minds of the public.”

— Noam Chomsky

9. “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

10. “We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”

— Noam Chomsky

11. “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”

— Noam Chomsky

12. “If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.”

— Noam Chomsky

13. “The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.”

— Noam Chomsky

14. “That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.”

— Noam Chomsky

15. “If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.”

— Noam Chomsky

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16. “How it is we have so much information, but know so little?”

— Noam Chomsky

17. “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

18. “Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.”

— Noam Chomsky

19. “Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

Featured in: Hero Quotes

21. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

23. “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

Featured in: Understanding Quotes

24. “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

— Noam Chomsky

25. “The more privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you have, the more responsibility you have.”

— Noam Chomsky

26. “For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”

— Noam Chomsky

27. “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

— Noam Chomsky

28. “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

29. “The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it.”

— Noam Chomsky

30. “Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy – their own population.”

— Noam Chomsky

31. “The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.”

— Noam Chomsky

32. “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.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

34. “A basic principal of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

36. “Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.”

— Noam Chomsky

37. “Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.”

— Noam Chomsky

38. “It doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.”

— Noam Chomsky

39. “If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you’re doing something wrong.”

— Noam Chomsky

40. “See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.”

— Noam Chomsky

41. “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

42. “We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.”

— Noam Chomsky

43. “International relations bears more than a slight resemblance to the mafia.”

— Noam Chomsky

44. “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.”

— Noam Chomsky

45. “There’s a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.”

— Noam Chomsky

46. “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

47. “That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.”

— Noam Chomsky

48. “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

49. “A fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions. A decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized.”

— Noam Chomsky

50. “It is quite possible – overwhelmingly probable, one might guess – that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”

— Noam Chomsky