Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

214. “It is not a war. It is murder.”

— Noam Chomsky

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

219. “Palestinians have no wealth or power.”

— Noam Chomsky

220. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

246. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

249. “Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.”

— Noam Chomsky

250. “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