Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

108. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

110. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

112. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

114. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

118. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

120. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

127. “People tend to rally around power.”

— Noam Chomsky

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

137. “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

138. “Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.”

— Noam Chomsky

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

144. “Obama’s primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.”

— Noam Chomsky

145. “For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.”

— Noam Chomsky

146. “In my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I’ve done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not very well taught.”

— Noam Chomsky

147. “The corporations plainly want academic scholarship to create a web of mystification that will avoid any public awareness of the way in which power actually functions in the society, and the faculty has caught the message and they do it magnificently.”

— Noam Chomsky

148. “The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.”

— Noam Chomsky

149. “Ontological questions are generally beside the point, hardly more than a form of harassment.”

— Noam Chomsky

150. “Control is the source of strategic power.”

— Noam Chomsky