Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “Modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable.”

— Noam Chomsky

255. “I mean, what’s the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth, political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same secret society where you’re trained to be a ruler – they both can run because they’re financed by the same corporate institutions.”

— Noam Chomsky

256. “If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.”

— Noam Chomsky

257. “Anything that you are achieving that undermines and threatens systems of power will meet with oppression. Systems of power don’t say ‘thank you.’ What’s important is not to focus all your efforts on the oppression, but to continue the constructive work.”

— Noam Chomsky

258. “European settlers coming to a foreign land, settling there, and either committing genocide against or expelling the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this respect.”

— Noam Chomsky

259. “The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.”

— Noam Chomsky

260. “Farming out atrocities to paramilitaries is standard operating procedure.”

— Noam Chomsky

261. “Nothing in these abstract economic models actually works in the real world. It doesn’t matter how many footnotes they put in, or how many ways they tinker around the edges. The whole enterprise is totally rotten at the core: it has no relation to reality.”

— Noam Chomsky

262. “The American claim that the bombing of North Vietnam was directed against military targets does not withstand direct investigation.”

— Noam Chomsky

263. “I don’t think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.”

— Noam Chomsky

264. “The worst drug of all by far is tobacco; the death toll from tobacco is just overwhelming.”

— Noam Chomsky

265. “I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.”

— Noam Chomsky

266. “The imperialist ideology, you say, can readily tolerate a quite large number of contradictions, infractions, and criticisms – all these remain acceptable, except one: to reveal the economic motives.”

— Noam Chomsky

267. “The general public are not even aware of major decisions that will determine their fate, hence are in no position to influence them.”

— Noam Chomsky

268. “WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for – presidential medal of honor.”

— Noam Chomsky

269. “The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination,’ we might say – exercised through the mass media.”

— Noam Chomsky

270. “It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.”

— Noam Chomsky

271. “Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.”

— Noam Chomsky

272. “These are questions for action, not speculation, which is idle.”

— Noam Chomsky

273. “Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.”

— Noam Chomsky

274. “Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely.”

— Noam Chomsky

275. “Anywhere in Latin America there is a potential threat of the pathology of caudillismo and it has to be guarded against.”

— Noam Chomsky

276. “Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs – hadn’t been done for a long time, and it’s illegal in most countries – in the air controller strike.”

— Noam Chomsky

277. “When the NSA’s surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented fifty-four terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world.”

— Noam Chomsky

278. “The American escalation of the war in Laos provoked a response by the Communist forces, which now control more of Laos than ever before.”

— Noam Chomsky

279. “Israel has a couple of hundred nuclear weapons and also chemical and biological weapons. This stockpile is not only a threat in itself but encourages others to proliferate in reaction and in self-defense. Is anybody saying anything about this?”

— Noam Chomsky

280. “As far as Marx’s analysis of capitalism, there’s a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he’s developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It’s abstract and it’s changed.”

— Noam Chomsky

281. “Democracy was regarded as entering into a crisis in the 1960s. The crisis was that large segments of the population were becoming organized and active and trying to participate in the political arena.”

— Noam Chomsky

282. “We are hurtling towards self-destruction at an alarming rate thanks chiefly to an advertising and propaganda system that goads people from infancy towards apathy, isolation, passivity, helplessness and separation.”

— Noam Chomsky

283. “When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what’s left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.”

— Noam Chomsky

284. “My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.”

— Noam Chomsky

285. “Democracy is a danger to any powerful group.”

— Noam Chomsky

286. “Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn’t reduce to physics. So it’s just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.”

— Noam Chomsky

287. “In the West, you don’t get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can’t do it. Not only can’t you tell the truth, you can’t think the truth. It’s just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.”

— Noam Chomsky

288. “We should have pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will.”

— Noam Chomsky

289. “Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market.”

— Noam Chomsky

290. “States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it’s usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they’re powerful, that’s roughly accurate.”

— Noam Chomsky

291. “The choice is ours, the choice is yours.”

— Noam Chomsky

292. “For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade.”

— Noam Chomsky

293. “I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.”

— Noam Chomsky

294. “Efforts can succeed over time, and not trying ensures that the worst will happen.”

— Noam Chomsky

295. “The childcare tax credit makes some sense.”

— Noam Chomsky

296. “Regulate the banks, get money out of elections; raise the minimum wage, environmental issues. They’re all very important and the Occupy movement made a difference. It shifted not only the discourse but to some extent, action on these issues.”

— Noam Chomsky

297. “Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.”

— Noam Chomsky

298. “Cuba forces in Angola gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can’t just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds.”

— Noam Chomsky

299. “In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom – along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.”

— Noam Chomsky

300. “In fact, when drugs are legalized, use sometimes goes down, it’s been claimed. Part of the reason is that teenage kids use illicit drugs because they are illicit. They are thumbing their noses at society. If they were legal, they might not.”

— Noam Chomsky