Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

166. “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

167. “You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.”

— Noam Chomsky

168. “It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.”

— Noam Chomsky

169. “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

170. “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

171. “Technology is basically neutral. It’s kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn’t care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody’s skull.”

— Noam Chomsky

172. “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

173. “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

174. “The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don’t have access to most of human experience, and if you don’t have access to experience, then you’re not going to be able to think properly.”

— Noam Chomsky

175. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

177. “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

178. “The government has a defect: it’s potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they’re pure tyrannies.”

— Noam Chomsky

179. “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

180. “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

181. “The goal is a society in which the basic social unit is you and your television set. If the kid next door is hungry, it’s not your problem. If the retired couple next door invested their assets badly and are now starving, that’s not your problem either.”

— Noam Chomsky

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

191. “The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.”

— Noam Chomsky

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky