Noam Chomsky Quotes

While the state can coerce, with some exceptions (like North Korea) it seems to me misleading to think of it as capable of "enslavement."

[Companies that specialized in how to destroy unions] don't make it a secret, and they have all sorts of techniques for management to destroy unions.

Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.

Mexico is a pretty poor country, but they are maintaining a free, high quality public education system, not for everyone of course but pretty substantial.

Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.

You know, you can go to the fiftieth thing on a Google list and that's the one you want, but the ones you are going to be directed to are the funders.

The US stole Texas from Mexico by violence, then invaded Mexico on ludicrous pretexts and conquered half of it, what is now the Southwest and Far West. That's why cities have Spanish names: San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Cruz, etc. All of this is suppressed in standard American history. But the victims remember. The conquerors typically have one history, the victims a different one - and often a more accurate one.

I organized tax resistance in 1965, with a friend. I kept at it for about ten years. I don't see it as a principle, it's a tactic. And I felt I had exhausted its potential as a tactic right about then, so I stopped.

After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the 'sense of utter irresponsibility' shown by the demonstrators.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

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.

Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.

The 'anti-globalisation movement' is the most significant proponent of globalisation - but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.

If in fact, the US story is correct, if it is true that Syria used chemical weapons, then it wouldn't be a major crime to send a kind of shot across the bow saying you can't do this anymore. Not the best thing in the world, but not a major crime, either. So, I think at the very least there should have been an inquiry into what happened. But just joining the bandwagon about how we're finally standing up to crimes in Syria, that's ridiculous.

The dynamics of the Taliban now appear to be very different and complex, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, as they attack governments and mainstream parties.

Western intellectuals, and also Third World intellectuals, were attracted to the Bolshevik counter-revolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine which says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.

In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. For a long time it's been pretty much run by private concentrated spending but now it's over the top. Elections increasingly over the years have been [public relations] extravaganzas.

It is now well-known that the Taliban's creation was facilitated by the CIA and the ISI as part of the 1980s anti-Soviet war.

We do not for example say that the person has a perfect knowledge of some language L similar to English but still different from it. What we say is that the child or foreigner has a 'partial knowledge of English' or is 'on his or her way' towards acquiring knowledge of English, and if they reach this goal, they will then know English.

That is [Edward Said] proposal as to how the term should be used. It surely does not describe those who are called "intellectuals" in standard usage, as he would be the first to agree.

Barron and Paul...rely on 'specialists' at the State and Defense Departments...Elsewhere in the media, similiar figures are bandied about, with equal credibility.

American imperialism has suffered a stunning defeat in Indochina. But the same forces are engaged In another war against a much less resilient enemy, the American people. Here, the prospects for success are much greater. The battleground is ideological, not military. At stake are the lessons to be drawn from the American war in Indochina; the outcome will determine the course and character of new imperial ventures.

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

It's not in doubt that tobacco is far more lethal than hard drugs.

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.

Africa's a wreck and it's not because it was hit by an asteroid. It's a wreck largely because it was hit by Europe.

There isn't much doubt that like other animal societies, those of Homo sapiens involved plenty of cooperation, which might have been considerably enhanced, one would suppose, by the emergence of the remarkable instrument of language.

An unstated but crucial premise is that the "responsible men" achieve that exalted status by their service to authentic power, a fact of life that they will discover soon enough if they try to pursue an independent path.

I think this country and the world would be far better off if the US is not an outlaw state.

In Western Europe, Turkey is regarded as uncivilized, so they can't come in into the European Union until they're civilized. I think it's the other way around. If you could achieve the level of civilization of, say, Turkish intelectuals, it would be quite an achievement.

The Irish were treated horribly, even here in Boston. For example, in the late nineteenth century they were treated pretty much like African Americans. You could find signs here in Boston in the restaurants saying "No dogs and Irish."

Now take a look at the way the Drug War is conducted over the past 40 years. It goes back farther, but start from 40 years ago: There's very little spent on prevention and treatment. There's a lot on policing, a ton of stuff on border control and a lot on out-of-country operations. And the effect on the availability of drugs is almost undetectable; drug prices don't change on measures of availability. So there are two possibilities: Either those conducting the Drug War are lunatics, or they have another purpose.

There is always room for Gramsci's "optimism of the will."

I think there are all kinds of intrusions into private rights that make use of contemporary technology.

Prophet just means intellectual. They were people giving geopolitical analysis, moral lessons, that sort of thing. We call them intellectuals today. There were the people we honor as prophets, there were the people we condemn as false prophets. But if you look at the biblical record, at the time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned.

[The Republican Party] for example, they do run the House of Representatives, they're a majority there, and it's the House that is essentially sending the government into shutdown and maybe default. But they won the majority of seats there because of various kinds of chicanery. They got a minority of the votes, but a majority of the seats, and they're using them to press forward an agenda which is extremely harmful to the public.

What is important to us is to reverse the shameful course being pursued by America. It won't be easy, but it must and can be done.

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

The 50,000 Korean mercenaries we had in Vietnam were professional killers and just massacred people outright. And the American army did plenty of that too, but it couldn't take it after awhile. It's not the kind of job you can give to conscripts who are not trained to be murderers.

When I was a boy, we were the only Jewish family in a terribly anti-Semitic neighborhood. Those streets weren't any fun for us but our parents never found that out. In a way, you avoid telling your parents what happened to you during those days.

People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.

One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop.

Syria is descending into suicide. It's a horror story and getting worse and worse. There's no bright spot on the horizon. What will probably happen, if this continues, is that Syria will be partitioned into probably three regions; a Kurdish region - which is already forming - that could pull out and join in some fashion the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, maybe with some kind of deal with Turkey.

In a capitalist system, there's a principle that if you invest, especially in a long-term risky investment, if something comes out of it, you're supposed to get the profit. It doesn't happen in our system. The taxpayer paid for it and gets nothing - assumes all of the risk, gets zero. The money goes into the pockets of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who are ripping off decades of work in the public sector.

There are real possibilities of reaching many of the Trump voters: many of them in fact voted for Obama, believing his rhetoric about "change," and upon realizing that they were deluded, have turned to Trump. And will find that they are again deluded. That's an opportunity that can be grasped, by organizing, education, activism right now.

When people know we are ready to use nuclear weapons, they're going to back off if we do something aggressive. So basically, nuclear weapons are always being used.

Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes... to an extent, that's true elsewhere, including the United States, but it's been pretty extreme in Greece.

Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are, in principle, under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist, that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level. [...] Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I am opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy.