Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress ‘suspects.’”

— Noam Chomsky

302. “This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars – they would think the country has gone insane.”

— Noam Chomsky

303. “Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.”

— Noam Chomsky

304. “There’s never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it’s mostly a fabrication.”

— Noam Chomsky

305. “Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.”

— Noam Chomsky

306. “In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison – they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.”

— Noam Chomsky

307. “Civil disobedience’s main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.”

— Noam Chomsky

308. “Violence can succeed, as Americans know well from the conquest of the national territory. But at terrible cost. It can also provoke violence in response, and often does.”

— Noam Chomsky

309. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “The people who live on the land – Israelis and Palestinians – have a right to live in security and peace.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

338. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

340. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

349. “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

350. “How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.”

— Noam Chomsky