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Noam Chomsky

410 quotes

“[…] the evacuation of Phnom Penh, widely denounced at the time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some time ago I was asked to sign a petition in defense of Robert Faurisson's “freedom of speech and expression.” The petition said absolutely nothing about the character, quality or validity of his research, but restricted itself quite explicitly to a defense of elementary rights that are taken for granted in democratic societies, calling upon university and government officials to “do everything possible to ensure the [Faurisson’s] safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.” I signed it without hesitation.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (October 11, 1980), see also Wikipedia:Faurisson affair regarding Robert Faurisson
Also quoted by: Robert Faurisson
“I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust I see no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson's work.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I find [no] credible evidence [of anti-Semitism or neo-Nazism] in the material that I have read concerning [Faurisson], either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Some Elementary Comments on The Rights of Freedom of Expression”, preface to Robert Faurisson Mémoire en défense (October 11, 1980)
“One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda. Another is that they have jobs in management, media, and academia and therefore work in some capacity as agents of the propaganda system--and they believe what the system expects them to believe. By and large, they're part of the privileged elite, and share the interests and perceptions of those in power.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Propaganda, American-style, ZPub (1987)
“In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion—a minimal respect for facts and logic—has been virtually abandoned.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Noam Chomsky interviewed by an anonymous interviewer, October 26, 1981; Published in: "The Treachery of the Intelligentsia: A French Travesty " in C. P. Otero (ed.), Language and Politics, Black Rose (1988), pp. 312-323.
“Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement and he was so regarded...by the mainstream Marxists... Bolshevism was a right-wing deviation.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech on “Lenin, Trotsky and Socialism and the Soviet Union”, (March 15, 1989)
“There was nothing remotely like socialism in the Soviet Union... [Lenin] didn't believe that it was possible to have socialism in the Soviet Union... He kept the view that the Soviet revolution was a holding action, they just kind of hold things in place, until the real revolution took place in Germany... That, presumably, gave some sort of justification for eliminating the socialist institutions.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech on “Lenin, Trotsky and Socialism and the Soviet Union”, (March 15, 1989)
“I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Language and Politics (1988) p. 775
“Roughly speaking, states are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power...”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Noam Chomsky, letter dated June 13, 1983. Published in: "The reasons for my concern: Response to Celia Jakubowicz," in C. P. Otero (ed.), Language and Politics, Black Rose (1988), pp. 369-72.
“The uniformity and obedience of the media, which any dictator would admire, [...]”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, (1985), p. 275
“For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the propaganda system to which we are subjected and in which all too often we serve as unwilling or unwitting instruments.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Propaganda, American-style" in Propaganda Review (1987).
“Israel is an embattled country. They rely very heavily on U.S. support. So they have developed a very sophisticated system of propaganda. They don't call it propaganda. They call it hasbarah. It is the only country I know of in the world that refers to propaganda as explanation. The Ministry of Propaganda is the Ministry of Explanation. The idea being that our position on everything is so obviously correct that if we only explain it to people, they will see that it is right.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Burton Levine in Shmate: A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought (May 1988) .
“During the 1960s, large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands.... The naive might call that democracy, but that's because they don't understand. The sophisticated understand that that's the crisis of democracy.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Manufacturing Consent", lecture at the University of Wisconsin (15 March 1989) .
“Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That's pretty obvious. You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case...”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chronicles of Dissent (December 13, 1989)
“We take for granted that the organism does not learn to grow arms or to reach puberty... When we turn to the mind and its products, the situation is not qualitatively different from what we find in the case of the body.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 2-3 as cited in: Jerry Fodor (1983) Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology. p. 4.
“Intrinsic (psychological) structure is rich . . . and diverse.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 3 as cited in: Jerry Fodor (1983).
“[This view is contrasted with all forms of Empiricism, by which it is] assumed that development is uniform across (cognitive) domains, and that the intrinsic properties of the initial state (of the mind) are homogeneous and undifferentiated - an assumption found across a spectrum reaching from Skinner to Piaget (who differ on much else).”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 3 as cited in: Jerry Fodor (1983).
“We may usefully think of the language faculty, the number faculty, and others as 'mental organs,' analogous to the heart or the visual system or the system of motor coordination and planning. There appears to be no clear demarcation line between physical organs, perceptual and motor systems and cognitive faculties in the respects in question.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the state says, "Whip up hysteria against the ," everybody starts yelling, jumping up and down, and screaming about the evil empire... See, if it happened in, say, Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, we know how they pulled it off. Namely, an order came from the Ministry of Truth, and everybody had to obey it. Now that didn't happen here. Here it happened in the way American propaganda always works: by servility and cowardice and class interest.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's nothing nice that you can say about any of [the Arab countries]. Syria, for example, is one of the most violent terrorist regimes in the world. But it doesn't happen to be aggressive. Maybe it would like to be, but it isn't. For objective reasons. There's virtually no correlation between the internal nature of some country and its commitment to external violence. And I think if you look back over history you'll never find a correlation, back to the Greeks.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: "What kind of peace?”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: talk at St. Michael's College, Vermont, around 1990 .
“The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of "Fuck You", so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response. We've long ago reached that level.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: letter to Alexander Cockburn (March 1, 1990), later paraphrased in Deterring Democracy (1992) p. 345.
“Strikingly, no concern was voiced over the glaringly obvious fact that no official reason was ever offered for going to war — no reason, that is, that could not be instantly refuted by a literate teenager.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Z Magazine (May 1991) .
“The point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything ... that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is going to be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: interview on WBAI (January 1992), republished by the Zmag website.
“Harold Laswell ... explained a couple of years after this in the early 1930s that we should not succumb to what he called democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.... In what's nowadays called a totalitarian state, military state or something, it's easy. You just hold a bludgeon over their heads, but as societies become more free and democratic you lose that capacity and therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear—propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state....”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview on WBAI (January 1992).
“The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Noam Chomsky in interview on The Late Show BBC Television (November 25, 1992), in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), p. 465
“If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Noam Chomsky in interview by John Pilger on The Late Show BBC Television, November 25, 1992 .
“One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. Marijuana can be grown almost anywhere, with little difficulty. It might not be easily marketable by major corporations. Tobacco is quite another story.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Deterring Democracy (1992) .
“Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Deterring Democracy (1992), p. 357.
“Independent nationalism is unacceptable to the West, no matter where it is, and it has to be driven back into subordination. In the case of Grenada, you can do it in a weekend; in the case of the Soviet Union it may take 70 years. But these are matters of scale, the logic is essentially the same.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Forum with John Pilger and Harold Pinter in Islington, London, May 1994 .
“The issue is whether we want to live in a free society or whether we want to live under what amounts to a form of self-imposed totalitarianism... admiring with awe the leader who saved them from destruction, while the educated masses goose-step on command and repeat the slogans they're supposed to repeat and the society deteriorates at home. We end up serving as a mercenary enforcer state, hoping that others are going to pay us to smash up the world.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The role of the media in contemporary politics forces us to ask what kind of a world and what kind of a society we want to live in, and in particular in what sense of democracy do we want this to be a democratic society? Let me begin by counter-posing two different conceptions of democracy.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That was a major achievement, and it led to a further achievement. Right at that time and after the war the same techniques were used to whip up a hysterical Red Scare, as it was called, which succeeded pretty much in destroying unions and eliminating such dangerous problems as freedom of the press and freedom of political thought. There was very strong support from the media, from the business establishment, which in fact organized, pushed much of this work, and it was, in general, a great success.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The progressive intellectuals, people of the John Dewey circle ... took great pride, as you can see from their own writings at the time, in having shown that what they called the "more intelligent members of the community," namely, themselves, were able to drive a reluctant population into a war by terrifying them and eliciting jingoist fanaticism.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And it taught a lesson: State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never criticized United States planners for mistakes in Vietnam. True, they made some mistakes, but my criticism was always aimed at what they aimed to do and largely achieved. The Russians doubtless made mistakes in Afghanistan, but my condemnation of their aggression and atrocities never mentioned those mistakes, which are irrelevant to the matter -- though not for the commissars. Within our ideological system, it is impossible to perceive that anyone might criticize anything but "mistakes" (I suspect that totalitarian Russia was more open in that regard).”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing should be done to impede people from teaching and doing their research even if at that very moment it was being used to massacre and destroy. [...] the radical students and I wanted to keep the labs on campus, on the principle that what is going to be going on anyway ought to be open and above board, so that people would know what is happening and act accordingly.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: referring to 1969
“States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Going back years, I am absolutely certain that I have taken far more extreme positions on people who deny the Holocaust than you have...Even to enter into the arena of debate on whether the Nazis carried out such atrocities is already to lose one's humanity.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A study of the inter-American system published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London concluded that, while the US pays lip service to democracy, the real commitment is to "private, capitalist enterprise." When the rights of investors are threatened, democracy has to go; if these rights are safeguarded, killers and torturers will do just fine.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable -- if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea is to create a picture among the population that we're all one happy family. We're America, we have a national interest, we're working together. There are us nice workers, the firms in which we work and the government who works for us. We pick them — they're our servants. And that's all there is in the world — no other conflicts, no other categories of people, no further structure to the system beyond that. Certainly nothing like class. Unless you happen to be in the ruling class, in which case you're very well aware of it.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Spectator sports make people more passive, because you're not doing them—you're watching somebody doing them.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... the stupefying effect spectator sports have in making people passive, atomized, obedient nonparticipants—nonquestioning, easily controlled and easily disciplined”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you look at the American army's counterinsurgency literature (a lot of which is now declassified), it begins with an analysis of the German experience in Europe, written with the cooperation of Nazi officers. Everything is described from the point of view of the Nazis-which techniques for controlling resistance worked, which ones didn't. With barely a change, that was transmuted into American counterinsurgency literature.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source