Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Expressing criticism of society is not being a grouch.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

207. “It is not a war. It is murder.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

209. “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

210. “So if a person produces an object on command, Humboldt wrote, we may admire what he did but we will despise what he is, not a true human being who acts in his own impulses and desires.”

— Noam Chomsky

211. “The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

213. “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

214. “Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things. Noam Chomsky.”

— Noam Chomsky

215. “Palestinians have no wealth or power.”

— Noam Chomsky

216. “Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.”

— Noam Chomsky

217. “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

218. “What’s the point of being better than someone else?”

— Noam Chomsky

219. “Even Stalin proclaimed his love for democracy. We do not learn about the nature of systems of power by listening to their rhetoric.”

— Noam Chomsky

220. “All public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they can survive in the labor market, fine. Otherwise, they die. That’s economics in a nutshell.”

— Noam Chomsky

221. “It’s as if we’re higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.”

— Noam Chomsky

222. “Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?”

— Noam Chomsky

223. “In a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time. They’re instinctive Marxists.”

— Noam Chomsky

224. “If something is repeated over and over as obvious, the chances are that it is obviously false.”

— Noam Chomsky

225. “The rise of multinational corporations that know neither patriotism nor morality but only self-interest, has made accountability almost non-existent. At virtually every level, I discern a demand by business for docile government and unrestrained corporate individualism. Where industry once yearned for subservient unions, it now wants no unions at all.”

— Noam Chomsky

226. “Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.”

— Noam Chomsky

227. “Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy.”

— Noam Chomsky

228. “Aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

— Noam Chomsky

229. “In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce. The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just don’t want them.”

— Noam Chomsky

230. “The whole educational and professional training system...”

— Noam Chomsky

231. “Mexico is a pretty poor country, but they are maintaining a free, high quality public education system, not for everyone of course but pretty substantial.”

— Noam Chomsky

232. “If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.”

— Noam Chomsky

233. “The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren’t being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.”

— Noam Chomsky

234. “Well, I think that what used to be called, centuries ago, “wage slavery” is intolerable. And I don’t think people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive. I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically, by their participants, by the communities in which they exist, and so on; and I think basically through various kinds of free association.”

— Noam Chomsky

235. “The US intervened in the Philippines to uplift and christianize the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same thing happened with other countries.”

— Noam Chomsky

236. “As long as nuclear weapons exist, the chances of survival of the human species are quite slight.”

— Noam Chomsky

237. “It’s only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it’s not terrorism.”

— Noam Chomsky

238. “The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can’t go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who’s sniffing cocaine.”

— Noam Chomsky

239. “If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don’t have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.”

— Noam Chomsky

240. “To some degree it matters who’s in office, but it matters more how much pressure they’re under from the public.”

— Noam Chomsky

241. “The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.”

— Noam Chomsky

242. “You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.”

— Noam Chomsky

243. “The elections are run by the same guys who sell toothpaste. They show you an image of a sports hero, or a sexy model, or a car going up a sheer cliff or something, which has nothing to do with the commodity, but it’s intended to delude you into picking this one rather than another one.”

— Noam Chomsky

244. “I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.”

— Noam Chomsky

245. “The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there’s something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males.”

— Noam Chomsky

246. “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

247. “Aristotle was right – the way to overcome the paradox of democracy is by reducing inequality, not reducing democracy.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

249. “Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure? They should have control over it themselves. Why shouldn’t communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?”

— Noam Chomsky

250. “The freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.”

— Noam Chomsky