Noam Chomsky Quotes

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. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— 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. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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16. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

19. “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

20. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

29. “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

30. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

48. “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.”

— Noam Chomsky

49. “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

50. “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