Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

356. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

360. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

380. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

382. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

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

— Noam Chomsky

393. “Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.”

— Noam Chomsky

394. “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

395. “We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders.”

— Noam Chomsky

396. “Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it’s growth in a sense...”

— Noam Chomsky

397. “In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, ’69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it’s worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started – an outright war started in 1962.”

— Noam Chomsky

398. “Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn’t survive very long if they did that.”

— Noam Chomsky

399. “Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.”

— Noam Chomsky

400. “Humans may be destroying their chances for decent survival. It won’t kill everybody, but it would change the world dramatically.”

— Noam Chomsky