Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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214. “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

215. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

217. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “Palestinians have no wealth or power.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

226. “It’s perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

232. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

234. “As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.”

— Noam Chomsky

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

246. “The core of the anarchist tradition, as I understand it, is that power is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can’t prove it, then it should be dismantled.”

— Noam Chomsky

247. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

249. “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

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250. “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