Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.”

— Noam Chomsky

453. “What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.”

— Noam Chomsky

454. “The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.”

— Noam Chomsky

455. “It is a privilege to join the campaign to support Bradley Manning for his courage and integrity in serving his country by helping make the government accountable to its citizens, and to inform the world of what its people should know.”

— Noam Chomsky

456. “In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands.”

— Noam Chomsky

457. “To summarize, draft resistance can make use of the inegalitarian nature of American society as a technique for increasing the cost of American aggression, and it threatens values that are important to those in a decision-making position.”

— Noam Chomsky

458. “On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.”

— Noam Chomsky

459. “From the late 1940s, into and through the ’50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.”

— Noam Chomsky

460. “The United States is a violent military state. It’s been involved in military action all over the place.”

— Noam Chomsky

461. “Sooner or later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous.”

— Noam Chomsky

462. “I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they’re becoming more diverse, like in Europe.”

— Noam Chomsky

463. “Thanh Hoa itself is a rich agricultural province. Rice fields, a pattern of many shades of green, stretch far into the distance along the road, which also winds through foothills and the fringes of heavy jungle where tigers are said to roam. The vegetation, wild or cultivated, is lush.”

— Noam Chomsky

464. “We should not be speaking to, but with. That is second nature to any good teacher.”

— Noam Chomsky

465. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

467. “There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.”

— Noam Chomsky

468. “If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.”

— Noam Chomsky

469. “Our crimes, for which we are responsible: as taxpayers, for failing to provide massive reparations, for granting refuge and immunity to the perpetrators, and for allowing the terrible facts to be sunk deep in the memory hole. All of this is of great significance, as it has been in the past.”

— Noam Chomsky

470. “It’s designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity.”

— Noam Chomsky

471. “But for another thing, there’s no law of nature which says that control over capital has to be in a few hands – that’s like saying that political power has to be in a few hands. Why? There wasn’t a law that said that the king and the nobles had to run everything, and there isn’t a law that says that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically, they can be changed historically.”

— Noam Chomsky

472. “If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from nontrivial principles, let’s see it.”

— Noam Chomsky

473. “Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.”

— Noam Chomsky

474. “Workers aren’t free to move, labor can’t move, but capital can.”

— Noam Chomsky

475. “The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

477. “The prescription for endless war poses a far greater danger to Americans than perceived enemies do, for reasons the terrorist organisations understand very well.”

— Noam Chomsky

478. “When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream. I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said.”

— Noam Chomsky

479. “The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with jihadi terrorism.”

— Noam Chomsky

480. “These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.”

— Noam Chomsky

481. “The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.”

— Noam Chomsky

482. “September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the US government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.”

— Noam Chomsky

483. “There clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what’s happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking.”

— Noam Chomsky

484. “A dramatic, evocative, thoughtful and very accessible account of one of the most important stories of the century – and one of the most ominous, unless citizens are aroused to action to rein in abusive state power.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

486. “I think there was an overemphasis in the early stage on militarization rather than directly providing relief. I don’t think it has any long-term significance.”

— Noam Chomsky

487. “I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organisational function – that’s important, and fine, and I support it.”

— Noam Chomsky

488. “The escalation to attack undefended civilian targets is just a classic illustration of terrorism.”

— Noam Chomsky

489. “States are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power.”

— Noam Chomsky

490. “You’ve got to keep them pretty scared, because unless they’re properly scared and frightened of all kinds of devils that are going destroy them from outside or inside or somewhere, they may start to think, which is very dangerous, because they’re not competent to think.”

— Noam Chomsky

491. “The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can’t be intimidated. Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why: China has been around for 4,000 years and just doesn’t give a damn. You can’t intimidate them – it’s driving people in Washington berserk. Yet of all the major powers, China has been the least aggressive militarily.”

— Noam Chomsky

492. “What we have to do is trap them into consumerism. Carry out enough propaganda and teasers and so on to make freed slaves feel they’ve got to have these commodities. They go to the company store and they get them, they’re in debt, and pretty soon they’re trapped – the slave economy’s back.”

— Noam Chomsky

493. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

— Noam Chomsky

494. “Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third World tyrannies.”

— Noam Chomsky

495. “We live in this world, not another one that we’d prefer, and sometimes it’s necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.”

— Noam Chomsky

496. “In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.”

— Noam Chomsky

497. “At Harvard they teach people how to rule the world and at MIT they teach them how to make the world work. This is for the elite schools. For the rest, turn them into servants.”

— Noam Chomsky

498. “The ‘free-floating intellectual’ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.”

— Noam Chomsky

499. “Independence of mind, enthusiasm, dedication to the field, and willingness to challenge and question and to explore new direction. There are plenty of people like that, but schools tend to discourage those characteristics.”

— Noam Chomsky

500. “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