Noam Chomsky Quotes

I think religion has often played a very positive role. Take western civilization, the Catholic Church has played an honorable role in helping those in need. In contrast, the US carried out a virtual war against the church in central America in the 1980's primarily because prime elements in the church were working with great courage and honor to help those in need. And to organize them to help themselves.

In my experience at least, the large public universities do not fall behind in fostering creativity and independence; often the contrary.

I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they're becoming more diverse, like in Europe.

Markets also have a very bad psychological effect. They drive people to a conception of themselves and society in which you're only after your own good, not the good of others and that's extremely harmful.

[Mikhail] Gorbachev complained. He was told look, there's nothing on paper. People didn't actually say it but the implication was look, if you are dumb enough to take faith in a gentleman's agreement with us, that's your problem. NATO expanded to East Germany.

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.

Plainly, such an approach does not exclude other ways of trying to comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can consistently believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about how people think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than from all of naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the arts may offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire.

Don't be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.

Elements of the Christian fundamentalist right are one of the strongest components of "support for Israel" - support in an odd sense, because they presumably want to see it destroyed in a cosmic battle at Armageddon, after which all the proper souls will ascend to heaven - or so I understand, again, not from close reading.

In the Munich agreement in late 1938 [Franklin] Roosevelt sent his chief adviser Sumner Welles, who came back with a very supportive statement saying that Hitler was someone we could really do business with and so on.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: What kind of peace?

Suppose that we believe what we are taught. . . . destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies . . . of institutional lunacy.

In fact, it's doing it all over the world. Obama, first of all, is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history. The drone assassination campaigns, which are just part of it. All of these operations, they are terror operations.

Of course language arose in a Darwinian biological world, because that's all there is, but that world relates only superficially to the pop-biology that circulates informally.

The term "globalization," like most terms of public discourse, has two meanings: its literal meaning, and a technical sense used for doctrinal purposes. In its literal sense, "globalization" means international integration. Its strongest proponents since its origins have been the workers movements and the left , which is why unions are called "internationals", and the strongest proponents today are those who meet annually in the World Social Forum and its many regional offshoots.

The contradiction is somehow unresolved. In the case of the business propaganda, it's particularly ironic because while business wants the population to hate the government, they want the population to love the government. Namely, they're in favor of a very powerful state which works in their interest.

Our health care is rationed by wealth.

In general I don't think the image of the state as a divinity is very helpful.

I don't bother writing about Fox News. It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, 'Look how courageous I am.' But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.

Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system.

I mean, the liberal democrats aren't going to tell the average American, "Yeah, you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established over the years that we're maintaining now." That's not going to be an answer. And they're not getting answers from the left.

Karl Marx said, “The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.” A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

Contemporary technology could be used to eliminate ownership and management of corporations. It could be used to provide - lets say Apple computers. In principle information technology could be used to provide direct information to the work force on the ground so that they could democratically decide what the company would do, eliminating the role of management. It could be used for that. People aren't developing technology for that purpose.

The general public are not even aware of major decisions that will determine their fate, hence are in no position to influence them

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

Why did the people think [Vietnam war] was fundamentally wrong and immoral? The guys who ran the polls, John E. Rielly, a professor at the University of Chicago, a liberal professor, he said what that means is that people thought too many Americans had being killed. Another possibility is they didn't like the fact that we were carrying out the worst crime since the Second World War. But that's so inconceivable that wasn't even offered as a possible reason.

At the peak of the so-called great success of neoliberal economics, in 2007, right before the crash, non-supervisory workers were at wages considerably lower than in 1979, when the neoliberal assault was taking off. That perfectly naturally causes resentment and fear, and combines with a tendency to blame the most vulnerable.

Take something you really don't think about: Plastics in the ocean. I mean plastics in the ocean have an enormous ecological effect.

The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided . . . democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival.

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

I don't think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.

There are in fact many ways to combat the Trump project of creating a tiny America, isolated from the world, cowering in fear behind walls while pursuing the Paul Ryan-style domestic policies that represent the most savage wing of the Republican establishment.

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.

The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq.

The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa's major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.

As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.

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

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible.

Our concern is to help people counter the efforts of those who seek to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers," so that the self-designated "responsible men" will be able to run the affairs of the world untroubled by the "bewildered herd" - the general public - who are to be marginalized and dispersed, directed to personal concerns, in a well-regulated "democracy."

What can you do to mitigate the likelihood that Iran will develop nuclear weapons? There's a very simple method: move towards establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone, which everybody in the world wants, but the US blocks.

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.

The U.S. is, to a very unusual extent, a business-run society.

Sooner or later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous.

It's true that many say that [they] object to the idea of "human nature," but it's not clear what that is supposed to mean. Are we different from ants?

Power has to be protected from scrutiny. That's the principle of every dictatorship, of every autocracy. You hear it from high priests at Harvard and every government department, that power has to be kept secret otherwise it will fade and it won't work. But Bradley Manning is violating that principle.

When I am at home, I never watch TV, but when I am abroad in a hotel I take a look at the BBC to find out what's going on.