Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

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

— Noam Chomsky

352. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

356. “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

357. “The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.”

— Noam Chomsky

358. “Surely few if any readers have come across the sentence they are now reading, and someone who had by chance heard or seen it could not possibly remember such a fact.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

360. “California is maybe the richest place in the world. They’re destroying the best public education system in the world.”

— Noam Chomsky

361. “Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, is moving towards a degree of independence.”

— Noam Chomsky

362. “It’s very common for the victims to understand a system better than the people who are holding the stick.”

— Noam Chomsky

363. “The US is a business-run huckster society, and its primary value is deceit.”

— Noam Chomsky

364. “The pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout history: those who line up in the service of the state are typically praised by the general intellectual community, and those who refuse to line up in service of the state are punished.”

— Noam Chomsky

365. “One of the functions that things like professional sports play, in our society and others, is to offer an area to deflect people’s attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.”

— Noam Chomsky

366. “It’s quite extraordinary to hear a supposedly learned person call the United States a leading terrorist nation, one of the leading terrorist nations in the world. It’s false and very treacherous teaching.”

— Noam Chomsky

367. “Stakeholders – meaning workers and community – the CEO could just as well be responsible to them. This presupposes there ought to be management but why does there have to be management? Why not have the stakeholders run the industry?”

— Noam Chomsky

368. “There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.”

— Noam Chomsky

369. “If the principle is, “Let’s not get lethal substances out to the public”, the first one you’d go after is tobacco. The next one you’d go after is alcohol. Way down the list you’d get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you’d get to marijuana.”

— Noam Chomsky

370. “I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.”

— Noam Chomsky

371. “Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.”

— Noam Chomsky

372. “The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.”

— Noam Chomsky

373. “When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people – along with despair about its future.”

— Noam Chomsky

374. “The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.”

— Noam Chomsky

375. “Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.”

— Noam Chomsky

376. “Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.”

— Noam Chomsky

377. “Ever since I’ve had any political awareness, I’ve felt either alone or part of a tiny minority.”

— Noam Chomsky

378. “Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.”

— Noam Chomsky

379. “The Democrats have pretty much given up on the white working class. That would require a commitment to economic issues and that’s not their concern.”

— Noam Chomsky

380. “The dangers of unexamined and unregulated monopoly power, particularly in the state executive, are hardly news. The right reaction is not passive acquiescence.”

— Noam Chomsky

381. “The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.”

— Noam Chomsky

382. “Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.”

— Noam Chomsky

383. “When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.”

— Noam Chomsky

384. “The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.”

— Noam Chomsky

385. “Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by ‘sophisticated’ methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.”

— Noam Chomsky

386. “Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

— Noam Chomsky

387. “You also have to get beyond that to dismantle the system of production for profit rather than production for use. That means dismantling at least large parts of market systems.”

— Noam Chomsky

388. “If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.”

— Noam Chomsky

389. “Clinton, Kennedy, they all carried out mass murder, but they didn’t think that that was what they were doing – nor does Bush. You know, they were defending justice and democracy from greater evils.”

— Noam Chomsky

390. “Governments don’t control people like they used to.”

— Noam Chomsky

391. “The first commitment is raise your salary. One of the ways to raise your salary sometimes is to have short-term profits but there are many other ways.”

— Noam Chomsky

392. “The people who were really important are the ones whose names are forgotten. And that’s true of every movement that ever existed.”

— Noam Chomsky

393. “Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That’s human nature.”

— Noam Chomsky

394. “With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.”

— Noam Chomsky

395. “There’s a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn’t mean the soldier that committed them – that means the commanders.”

— Noam Chomsky

396. “It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn’t make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.”

— Noam Chomsky

397. “Don’t be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.”

— Noam Chomsky

398. “There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism.”

— Noam Chomsky

399. “Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny have created an important political radio show that balances humor and unreported news. At a time when media conglomerates dominate the airwaves, independent media like Citizen Radio is vital to national discourse.”

— Noam Chomsky

400. “The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.”

— Noam Chomsky