Noam Chomsky quotes

It is a good idea to revitalize community colleges, to cut back, to modify the student loan program so it does not go through banks.
- Noam Chomsky

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media
- Noam Chomsky

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
- Noam Chomsky

There’s plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can’t duplicate that on blogs.”
- Noam Chomsky

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.
- Noam Chomsky

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
- Noam Chomsky

I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‘Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?
- Noam Chomsky

As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940’s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states – no more, no less.
- Noam Chomsky

Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.
- Noam Chomsky

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‘That person I see is a savage monster;’ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.
- Noam Chomsky

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.
- Noam Chomsky

Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.
- Noam Chomsky

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination’, we might say – exercised through the mass media.
- Noam Chomsky

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
- Noam Chomsky

It’s perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.
- Noam Chomsky

The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism – mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets.
- Noam Chomsky

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

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the ‘engineering of consent’ by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.
- Noam Chomsky

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

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.
- Noam Chomsky

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.
- Noam Chomsky