Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

173. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “Expressing criticism of society is not being a grouch.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

195. “Classical liberalism was wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, but.”

— Noam Chomsky

196. “My grandchildren are on social media all the time, and they think they have friends. But it’s not what I would’ve called a friend, ever.”

— Noam Chomsky

197. “Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.”

— Noam Chomsky

198. “Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.”

— Noam Chomsky

199. “The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”

— Noam Chomsky

200. “The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.”

— Noam Chomsky