Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “It’s not radical Islam that worries the US – it’s independence.”

— Noam Chomsky

55. “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

56. “The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.”

— Noam Chomsky

57. “An old man in Gaza held a placard that read: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.” The.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

59. “I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.”

— Noam Chomsky

60. “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

61. “People not only don’t know what’s happening to them, they don’t even know that they don’t know.”

— Noam Chomsky

62. “If voting could actually change anything, it would be illegal.”

— Noam Chomsky

63. “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

64. “In the United States everyone is an illegal immigrant – everyone except the people in Indian Reservations. This is an immigrant society.”

— Noam Chomsky

65. “Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.”

— Noam Chomsky

66. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

68. “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

69. “There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.”

— Noam Chomsky

70. “The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.”

— Noam Chomsky

71. “Legalizing marijuana would make a lot of sense, I don’t think there’s a single case of marijuana overdose on record and tens of millions of users. It’s much less dangerous than alcohol, for example.”

— Noam Chomsky

72. “Procurement is a major technique of state subsidy.”

— Noam Chomsky

73. “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

74. “There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there’s a profit to be made from them.”

— Noam Chomsky

75. “Settler colonialism, which is what this is, is by far the worst kind of imperialism, because it gets rid of the native population. Other kinds of imperialism exploit them, but settler colonialism eliminates them, “exterminates” them, to use the words of the Founding Fathers.”

— Noam Chomsky

76. “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

77. “People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.”

— Noam Chomsky

78. “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

79. “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 – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

— Noam Chomsky

80. “Technology is usually fairly neutral. It’s like a hammer, which can be used to build a house or to destroy someone’s home. The hammer doesn’t care. It is almost always up to us to determine whether the technology is good or bad.”

— Noam Chomsky

81. “The ideal is to create a completely fragmented atomized society where everybody is totally alone, doing nothing but trying to pursue created wants, and the wants are created.”

— Noam Chomsky

82. “Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.”

— Noam Chomsky

83. “There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster;’ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.”

— Noam Chomsky

84. “The media are a corporate monopoly. They have the same point of view. The two parties are two factions of the business party. Most of the population doesn’t even bother voting because it looks meaningless. They’re marginalized and properly distracted. At least that’s the goal.”

— Noam Chomsky

85. “The anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.”

— Noam Chomsky

86. “There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

88. “The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That’s never been impossible and never been easy.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

90. “Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They’re designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators.”

— Noam Chomsky

91. “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

92. “Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That’s pretty obvious. You can’t have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case...”

— Noam Chomsky

93. “A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.”

— Noam Chomsky

94. “The best defense against democracy is to distract people.”

— Noam Chomsky

95. “The free market is ‘socialism’ for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit – markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich.”

— Noam Chomsky

96. “Resource extraction impacts a global environment that is increasingly at severe risk.”

— Noam Chomsky

97. “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

98. “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.”

— Noam Chomsky

99. “Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.”

— Noam Chomsky

100. “One of the greatest dangers is secular religion – state worship.”

— Noam Chomsky