Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “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

152. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

154. “There are plenty of things that are unknown, but are assumed reasonably to exist, even in the most basic sciences. Maybe 90 percent of the mass-energy in the universe is called “dark,” because nobody knows what it is.”

— Noam Chomsky

155. “I know some really outstanding Turkish journalists, and have been pleased and honored to be able to join with them a few times in their courageous protests against state terror and repression.”

— Noam Chomsky

156. “The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.”

— Noam Chomsky

157. “I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.”

— Noam Chomsky

158. “Of course, everybody says they’re for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: What kind of peace?”

— Noam Chomsky

159. “I don’t say you’re self-censoring – I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying; but what I’m saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

— Noam Chomsky

160. “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

161. “The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It’s unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable – if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.”

— Noam Chomsky

162. “The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.”

— Noam Chomsky

163. “It’s very hard to look in the mirror. We all know this. It’s much easier to have illusions about yourself. And in particular, when you think, well, I’m going to believe what I like, but I’ll say what the powerful want, you do that over time, and you believe what you say.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

165. “You keep plugging away – that’s the way social change takes place. That’s the way every social change in history has taken place: by a lot of people, who nobody ever heard of, doing work.”

— Noam Chomsky

166. “Capitalism denies the right to live. You have only the right to remain on the labour market.”

— Noam Chomsky

167. “There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind.”

— Noam Chomsky

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the ‘engineering of consent’ by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.”

— Noam Chomsky

172. “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

173. “The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.”

— Noam Chomsky

174. “The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn’t make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn’t discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That’s what you’ve got a brain for.”

— Noam Chomsky

175. “If a man acts in a purely mechanical way, reacting to external demands or instruction rather than in ways determined by his own interests and energies and power, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”14.”

— Noam Chomsky

176. “If we move toward the weaponisation of space, we can bid farewell to the planet. The chances of survival are very slight.”

— Noam Chomsky

177. “If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion.”

— Noam Chomsky

178. “Thinking is a human feature. Will AI someday really think? That’s like asking if submarines swim. If you call it swimming then robots will think, yes.”

— Noam Chomsky

179. “If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I’m a professor at MIT, that’s nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.”

— Noam Chomsky

180. “I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.”

— Noam Chomsky

181. “You don’t get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.”

— Noam Chomsky

182. “Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.”

— Noam Chomsky

183. “There are two parties, so-called, but they’re really factions of the same party, the Business Party. Both represent some range of business interests. In fact, they can change their positions 180 degrees, and nobody even notices.”

— Noam Chomsky

184. “We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.”

— Noam Chomsky

185. “The health care system in the United States, I’m sure you know, is a total international scandal. It’s twice the per capita cost of comparable countries and one of the worst outcomes, with a huge number of people uninsured altogether. And it’s going to get worse.”

— Noam Chomsky

186. “If you’re worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it’s almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.”

— Noam Chomsky

187. “Policy is largely set by economic elites and organized groups representing business interests with little concern for public attitudes or public safety, as long as the public remains passive and obedient.”

— Noam Chomsky

188. “Presented with the claims of nineteenth-century racist anthropology, a rational person will ask two sorts of questions: ‘What is the scientific status of the claims?’ ‘What social or ideological needs do they serve?’”

— Noam Chomsky

189. “The Republican and Democratic Parties are only factions of the Government Party.”

— Noam Chomsky

190. “The rascal multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.”

— Noam Chomsky

191. “Concentration of executive power, unless it’s very temporary and for specific circumstances, let’s say fighting world war two, it’s an assault on democracy.”

— Noam Chomsky

192. “Well, they really didn’t have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can’t do anything. Look, there’s one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision-that’s the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?”

— Noam Chomsky

193. “In fact, it’s doing it all over the world. Obama, first of all, is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history. The drone assassination campaigns, which are just part of it. All of these operations, they are terror operations.”

— Noam Chomsky

194. “The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category – except for the category of familiarity.”

— Noam Chomsky

195. “Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.”

— Noam Chomsky

196. “As international support for Obama’s decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world.”

— Noam Chomsky

197. “The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”

— Noam Chomsky

198. “I don’t buy much. Almost buy nothing. I buy what I need, do it the easiest way possible.”

— Noam Chomsky

199. “La libertad, cuando no hay oportunidades, es un regalo envenenado; y negarse a proporcionar estas oportunidades es un acto criminal.”

— Noam Chomsky

200. “I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.”

— Noam Chomsky