Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Education is not for profit. If you’re not in education for profit, it’s not going to be a fair critique for education.”

— Noam Chomsky

102. “If it’s wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.”

— Noam Chomsky

103. “Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.”

— Noam Chomsky

104. “The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country – far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.”

— Noam Chomsky

105. “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

106. “Advertising is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled.”

— Noam Chomsky

107. “Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.”

— Noam Chomsky

108. “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”

— Noam Chomsky

109. “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

110. “Popular struggles to bring about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though there is a long way to go, and there is often regression.”

— Noam Chomsky

111. “The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.”

— Noam Chomsky

112. “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”

— Noam Chomsky

113. “The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It’s very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can’t fight the world alone.”

— Noam Chomsky

114. “Quite generally, international affairs have more than a slight resemblance to the Mafia. The Godfather does not take it lightly when he is crossed, even by a small storekeeper.”

— Noam Chomsky

115. “War is a racket. The few profit, the many pay.”

— Noam Chomsky

116. “As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.”

— Noam Chomsky

117. “The press is owned by wealthy men who only want certain things to reach the public.”

— Noam Chomsky

118. “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

119. “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

120. “We’re human beings; we’re not robots. And face-to-face contact is something totally different than typing a text message and then forgetting about it.”

— Noam Chomsky

121. “It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.”

— Noam Chomsky

122. “The atrocities in Cambodia are a direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system.”

— Noam Chomsky

123. “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

124. “You can’t have meaningful political democracy without functioning economic democracy.”

— Noam Chomsky

125. “In ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.”

— Noam Chomsky

126. “The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. Straight-out war crime.”

— Noam Chomsky

127. “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

128. “The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world’s energy.”

— Noam Chomsky

129. “I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.”

— Noam Chomsky

130. “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

131. “Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.”

— Noam Chomsky

132. “One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop.”

— Noam Chomsky

133. “It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.”

— Noam Chomsky

134. “People tend to rally around power.”

— Noam Chomsky

135. “As any good teacher knows, the methods of instruction and the range of material covered are matters of small importance as compared with the success in arousing the natural curiosity of the students and stimulating their interest in exploring on their own.”

— Noam Chomsky

136. “The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.”

— Noam Chomsky

137. “Freedom without opportunity is a devil’s gift.”

— Noam Chomsky

138. “There’s a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.”

— Noam Chomsky

139. “Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.”

— Noam Chomsky

140. “A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.”

— Noam Chomsky

141. “States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.”

— Noam Chomsky

142. “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

143. “Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.”

— Noam Chomsky

144. “I didn’t pay my taxes for years.”

— Noam Chomsky

145. “Anti-Americanism is a pure totalitarian concept. The very notion is idiotic.”

— Noam Chomsky

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they’re really factions of the same party, the Business Party.”

— Noam Chomsky

150. “In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.”

— Noam Chomsky