Top 500 Noam Chomsky Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Roughly speaking, I think it’s accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

404. “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

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. “People are dangerous. If they’re able to involve themselves in issues that matter, they may change the distribution of power, to the detriment of those who are rich and privileged.”

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

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

— Noam Chomsky

409. “One of the problems of organizing in the North, in the rich countries, is that people tend to think – even the activists – that instant gratification is required. You constantly hear: ‘Look I went to a demonstration, and we didn’t stop the war so what’s the use of doing it again?’”

— Noam Chomsky

410. “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

411. “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

412. “The IMF economists were doubtless shaken by the extreme failures of their prescriptions over many years, and by the collapse of the intellectual edifice of economic theory on which they were relying.”

— Noam Chomsky

413. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “And when you look, most of the time these authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else – they’re just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top. So.”

— Noam Chomsky

440. “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

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

— Noam Chomsky

442. “States are not moral agents.”

— Noam Chomsky

443. “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

444. “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

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. “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

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. “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

450. “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