Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.”

— Noam Chomsky

302. “If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.”

— Noam Chomsky

303. “Half the population hold that the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves, as polls regularly show.”

— Noam Chomsky

304. “Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.”

— Noam Chomsky

305. “There’s no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Genghis Khan.”

— Noam Chomsky

306. “The country that consistently ranks among the highest in educational achievement is Finland. A rich country, but education is free. Germany, education is free. France, education is free.”

— Noam Chomsky

307. “If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself.”

— Noam Chomsky

308. “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

309. “As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.”

— Noam Chomsky

310. “The responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

312. “It makes sense for societies to make education compulsory for children. Children are vulnerable. They can’t make decisions. But the decisions can’t all be left in the hands of the parents. They can be irresponsible too.”

— Noam Chomsky

313. “Borders are semiporous. Capital flows more freely than people across them. on C Span.”

— Noam Chomsky

314. “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

315. “The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”

— Noam Chomsky

316. “If you’re in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.”

— Noam Chomsky

317. “John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he’s regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.”

— Noam Chomsky

318. “Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.”

— Noam Chomsky

319. “The ‘anti-globalisation movement’ is the most significant proponent of globalisation – but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.”

— Noam Chomsky

320. “Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.”

— Noam Chomsky

321. “The racism in Europe takes the form of anti-immigrant extremism – which is bad enough here – I think it’s hard to measure, but my guess is that it’s probably worse there.”

— Noam Chomsky

322. “The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or ‘hypothesis-formulating’ ability of unknown character and complexity.”

— Noam Chomsky

323. “Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.”

— Noam Chomsky

324. “Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that’s so deep in history that there’s no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.”

— Noam Chomsky

325. “Democratic societies can’t force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.”

— Noam Chomsky

326. “Willingness to be puzzled is a valuable trait to cultivate, from childhood to advanced inquiry.”

— Noam Chomsky

327. “The Irish sea is a chasm, and it just depends who’s been holding the whip for 800 years and who’s been under it for 800 years.”

— Noam Chomsky

328. “We’re supposed to worship Adam Smith but you’re not supposed to read him. That’s too dangerous.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

330. “Small changes can magnifiy. The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.”

— Noam Chomsky

331. “American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There’s been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.”

— Noam Chomsky

332. “If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.”

— Noam Chomsky

333. “The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!”

— Noam Chomsky

334. “If you want to scare people, you talk about evil.”

— Noam Chomsky

335. “It is not a war. It is murder.”

— Noam Chomsky

336. “The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.”

— Noam Chomsky

337. “State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.”

— Noam Chomsky

338. “The term ‘globalisation’ is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests.”

— Noam Chomsky

339. “Cuba has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since 1959, Cuba has been under attack from the hemispheric superpower.”

— Noam Chomsky

340. “Right after 9-11, as far as I know, one newspaper in the United States had the integrity to investigate opinion in the Muslim world: the ‘Wall Street Journal.’”

— Noam Chomsky

341. “Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That’s just fine. It’s just the poor who aren’t supposed to cooperate.”

— Noam Chomsky

342. “What the public wants is called ‘politically unrealistic.’ Translated into English, that means power and privilege are opposed to it.”

— Noam Chomsky

343. “In fact, some leaders come right out and say it. Mario Draghi the president of the European Central Bank had an interview with the Wall St Journal in which he said the social contract’s dead; we finally got rid of it.”

— Noam Chomsky

344. “If you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.”

— Noam Chomsky

345. “To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to ‘moral equivalence,’ or ‘political correctness,’ or ‘the error of of atheism,’ or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.”

— Noam Chomsky

346. “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

347. “The point of advertising is to destroy markets.”

— Noam Chomsky

348. “The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet.”

— Noam Chomsky

349. “Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.”

— Noam Chomsky

350. “Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.”

— Noam Chomsky