Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “When leaders carry out policies for decades that have no consequences for the stated goal and are very costly, you have to ask whether they are telling you the truth or whether the policies are for a different goal, because they are not reducing drug use.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

409. “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

410. “There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. One view is the norm is stagnation and occasionally you get out of it. The other is that the norm is growth and occasionally you can get into stagnation. You can debate that but it’s a period of close to global stagnation.”

— Noam Chomsky

411. “We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid.”

— Noam Chomsky

412. “It’s very important for institutions of concentrated power to keep people alone and isolated: that way they’re ineffective, they can’t defend themselves against indoctrination, they can’t even figure out what they think.”

— Noam Chomsky

413. “Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent – and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

415. “After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the ‘sense of utter irresponsibility’ shown by the demonstrators.”

— Noam Chomsky

416. “In the years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about 1.5 million people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Forget what was happening in South Africa and Namibia.”

— Noam Chomsky

417. “Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.”

— Noam Chomsky

418. “Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.”

— Noam Chomsky

419. “Worker ownership within a state capitalist, semi-market system is better than private ownership but it has inherent problems. Markets have well-known inherent inefficiencies. They’re very destructive.”

— Noam Chomsky

420. “Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.”

— Noam Chomsky

421. “Judge Afiuni has suffered enough. She has been subject to acts of violence and humiliations to undermine her human dignity. I am convinced that she must be set free.”

— Noam Chomsky

422. “Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.”

— Noam Chomsky

423. “Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they’re attacking, like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That’s the standard way to run imperial wars.”

— Noam Chomsky

424. “About half the population thinks that every person in Congress, including their own representative, should be thrown out. That’s the center not holding.”

— Noam Chomsky

425. “Earlier in the twentieth century some critics called fascism “capitalism with the gloves off,” meaning that fascism was pure capitalism without democratic rights and organizations.”

— Noam Chomsky

426. “Any attempt to solve a conflict has to touch upon its very core; the core, more often than not, lies in its history.”

— Noam Chomsky

427. “The United States happens to be the only state in the world that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism.”

— Noam Chomsky

428. “The whole infrastructure of air travel was, and is, part of government policy. It is not a natural development of a free economic system – at least not in the way that is claimed. The same is true of the roads, of course.”

— Noam Chomsky

429. “A tremendous amount of the entrepreneurial initiative, if you want to call it that, comes from the dynamic state sector on which most of the economy relies to socialize costs and risks and privatize eventual profit. And that’s achieved by, if you like, advertising.”

— Noam Chomsky

430. “Well before September 11, it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.”

— Noam Chomsky

431. “The target of preventive war must have several characteristics. It must be virtually defenceless; it must be important enough to be worth the trouble; it must be possible to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.”

— Noam Chomsky

432. “The culture and ideology fostered in this globalization process relate largely to “lifestyle” themes and goods and their acquisition; and they tend to weaken any sense of community helpful to civic life.”

— Noam Chomsky

433. “In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.”

— Noam Chomsky

434. “Victors do not investigate their own crimes, so that little is known about them...”

— Noam Chomsky

435. “States are not moral agents.”

— Noam Chomsky

436. “In fact, the capitalist class in the ’50s was sort of part of a social contract. It was part of the tenor of the times.”

— Noam Chomsky

437. “Occupying armies have responsibilities, not rights. Their primary responsibility is to withdraw as quickly and expeditiously as possible, in a manner determined by the occupied population.”

— Noam Chomsky

438. “The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as to direct the thought of most of the world – primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I.”

— Noam Chomsky

439. “The labor movement had been pretty much killed in the 1920s, almost destroyed. It revived in the 1930s and made a huge difference. By the late 1930s the business world was already trying to find ways to beat it back.”

— Noam Chomsky

440. “The United States has done some very good things in the world, and that does not change the fact that the World Court was quite correct in condemning the United States as an international terrorist state.”

— Noam Chomsky

441. “Free markets are based on the free circulation of labor. If you don’t have free circulation of labor, you don’t have free markets.”

— Noam Chomsky

442. “The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.”

— Noam Chomsky

443. “Take Ron Paul. He appeals to a lot of progressives. He said on Fox, ‘The greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming.’ He doesn’t provide any argument or evidence as to why he disregards the scientific consensus – just, I say so, period. With that attitude, you really are approaching the edge.”

— Noam Chomsky

444. “My proposal happens to be very mainstream.”

— Noam Chomsky

445. “Modern science and technology can relieve men of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it.”

— Noam Chomsky

446. “Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.”

— Noam Chomsky

447. “And they make sure that their own interests are very well cared for, however “grievous” the impact on the people of England, or others. Now it’s not merchants and manufacturers, it’s financial institutions and multinational corporations. The people who Adam Smith called the “masters of mankind” – and they’re following “the vile maxim,” “All for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.” They’re just going to pursue policies that benefit them and harm everyone else.”

— Noam Chomsky

448. “Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.”

— Noam Chomsky

449. “What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.”

— Noam Chomsky

450. “It is a privilege to join the campaign to support Bradley Manning for his courage and integrity in serving his country by helping make the government accountable to its citizens, and to inform the world of what its people should know.”

— Noam Chomsky