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Noam Chomsky

410 quotes

“When British and then American troops moved into southern Italy, they simply reinstated the fascist order—the industrialists. But the big problem came when the troops got to the north, which the Italian resistance had already liberated. The place was functioning—industry was running. We had to dismantle all of that and restore the old order.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Next we worked on destroying the democratic process. The left was obviously going to win the elections; it had a lot of prestige from the resistance, and the traditional conservative order had been discredited. The US wouldn't tolerate that.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ricardo's "science" was founded on the principle that capital is more or less immobile and labor highly mobile. We are enjoined today to worship the consequences of Ricardo's science, despite the fact that the assumptions on which they are based have been reversed: capital is highly mobile, and labor virtually immobile -- libertarian conservatives lead the way in rejecting Adam Smith's principle that "free circulation of labor" is a cornerstone of free trade, in keeping with their contempt for markets (except for the weak).”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Z Magazine, February 1995 .
“[The "liberal media"] love to be denounced from the right, and the right loves to denounce them, because that makes them look like courageous defenders of freedom and independence while, in fact, they are imposing all of the presuppositions of the propaganda system.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Ira Shorr, February 11, 1996
“I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Andrew Marr on BBC 2 (UK), February 14, 1996 .
“Reform is a word you always ought to watch out for. Like, when Mao started the Cultural Revolution it wasn't called a reform. Reform is a change that you're supposed to like. So as soon as you hear the word reform you can reach for your wallet and see who's lifting it. [...] Subsidy is another interesting word, kind of like reform. It's a subsidy if public funds are used for public purposes. That's called a subsidy. It's not called a subsidy when it goes to private wealth. That's reform or something.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Talk titled "Free Market Fantasies" at Harvard University, April 13, 1996 .
“Tough love" is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Powers and Prospects, 1996, p.137
“There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Ira Shorr, February 11, 1996 .
“The question of whether a computer is playing chess, or doing long division, or translating Chinese, is like the question of whether robots can murder or airplanes can fly -- or people; after all, the "flight" of the Olympic long jump champion is only an order of magnitude short of that of the chicken champion (so I'm told). These are questions of decision, not fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of common usage.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Powers and Prospects, 1996 .
“If Hitler had been a crook... We're very fortunate in the United States, we've never had a charismatic leader who weren't a gangster. Every one of them was a thug, or a robber, or something. Which is fine, then they don't cause a lot of trouble. If you get one who's honest, like Hitler, then you're in trouble - they just want power.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Matthew Rothschild, 1997
“A lot of sophistication has been developed about the utilization of machines for complex purposes, and it doesn't make sense not to use it if you can think of a good question to ask. Playing chess is about the dumbest question you can ask. But, if you want, maybe can make money that way, or something. In fact, what's going on with the chess is about as interesting as the fact that a front-end loader can lift more than an Olympics champion, weight lifter, or something. Probably so, but, you know, these are just not serious questions.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Talk titled "Language & Mind", 1997.
“The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Z Magazine, May 1998 .
“No individual gets up and says, I'm going to take this because I want it. He'd say, I'm going to take it because it really belongs to me and it would be better for everyone if I had it. It's true of children fighting over toys. And it's true of governments going to war. Nobody is ever involved in an aggressive war; it's always a defensive war -- on both sides.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Tor Wennerberg, November 1998 .
“The U.S. has always insisted on its right to use force, whatever international law requires, and whatever international institutions decide.... The U.S., of course, is not alone in these practices. Other states commonly act in much the same way, if not constrained by external or internal forces.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: PBS, March 12, 1998 .
“The "corporatization of America" during the past century has been an attack on democracy—and on markets, part of the shift from something resembling "capitalism" to the highly administered markets of the modern state/corporate era. A current variant is called "minimizing the state," that is, transferring decision-making power from the public arena to somewhere else: "to the people" in the rhetoric of power; to private tyrannies, in the real world.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Profit Over People (1999).
“Because they don't teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chomsky on Miseducation, 1999 .
“A good teacher knows that the best way to help students learn is to allow them to find the truth by themselves. Students don't learn by a mere transfer of knowledge, consumed through rote memorization and later regurgitated. True learning comes about through the discovery of truth, not through the imposition of an official truth.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chomsky on Miseducation, 1999, p. 21
“The United States is not going in there to save the oppressed. If we wanted to save the oppressed we could have supported the nonviolent movement instead of selling them out at Dayton. Any kind of turbulence in the Balkans is a threat to the interests of rich, privileged, powerful people. Therefore, any turbulence in the Balkans is called a crisis. The same circumstances would not be a crisis were they to occur in Sierra Leone, or Central America, or even Turkey. But in Europe, the heartland of American economic interests, any threat in the Balkans has the possibility of spilling over.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Michael Lerner in Tikkun, April 5, 1999 .
“If the principle is, "Let's not get lethal substances out to the public", the first one you'd go after is tobacco. The next one you'd go after is alcohol. Way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marijuana.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dialogue with trade unionists, February 2, 1999 .
“Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people, or working people.... Actually, the peak of marijuana use was as I said, in the seventies, but that was rich kids, so you don't throw them in jail. And then it got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw people in jail for it, when it was poor people.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dialogue with trade unionists, February 2, 1999
“The criticisms were so tepid they were embarrassing. Almost nobody, including me, dared to criticize the U.S. attack on South Vietnam. That's like talking Hittite. Nobody even understood the words.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence will lead to "subservience and venality", and will "suffocate[s] the germs of virtue". And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which was considered an abomination under classical liberal principles.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Newt Gingrich ... quite demonstrably is the leading welfare freak in the country.... His own district in Cobb County Georgia gets more federal subsidies than any suburban county in the country, outside of the federal system itself.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet to enter approved memory is the "finale" described in the official Air Force history, a 1000-plane raid on civilian targets organized by General "Hap" Arnold to celebrate the war's end, five days after Nagasaki. According to survivors, leaflets were dropped among the bombs announcing the surrender.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most extreme types, like Murray Rothbard, are at least honest. They'd like to eliminate highway taxes because they force you to pay for a road you may never drive on. As an alternative, they suggest that if you and I want to get somewhere, we should build a road there and charge people tolls on it. Just try generalizing that. Such a society couldn't survive, and even if it could, it would be so full of terror and hate that any human being would prefer to live in hell.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with the intention of destroying secular Palestinian nationalism.... OK, they did destroy the secular PLO and instead what they got was an Islamic fundamentalist movement that they couldn't control, that drove them out of most of Lebanon. What did they do next? They did exactly the same thing in the West Bank.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Stability means we run it. There are countries that are very stable. Cuba is stable, but that's not called stability.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Hugh Gusterson, November 2000 .
“The Ottoman Empire was an ugly affair, but they had the right idea. The rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone pretty much–were mostly interested in robbing them–and they left them alone to run their own affairs, and their own regions and their own communities with a lot of local self determination.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Delivered at the First Annual Maryse Mikhail Lecture “No peace without justice; no justice without truth” The University of Toledo, March 4, 2001.
“I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Svetlana Vukovic & Svetlana Lukic on Radio B92, Belgrade, Serbia, September 19, 2001 .
“Right after September 11, the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, said the first thing that had to be done to combat terrorism was to pass fast-track. Now that should really make Osama bin Laden tremble in his boots - that the President has Kremlin-style authority to sign economic agreements.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by V. K. Ramachandran in Frontline, November 11, 2001 .
“It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them. These are, unfortunately, leading themes of history.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Talk titled "The World After September 11th", AFSC Conference at Tufts University, Massachusetts, December 8, 2001 .
“Nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think of the United States as an "innocent victim" only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 9-11, 2001 .
“Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a "war against terrorism.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 9-11, 2001
“The list of the states that have joined the coalition against terror is quite impressive. They have a characteristic in common. They are certainly among the leading terrorist states in the world. And they happen to be led by the world champion.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a historic event. Not unfortunately because of its scale. Unpleasant to think about, but in terms of the scale it's not that unusual. I did say it's the worst, probably the worst instant human toll of any crime. And that may be true. But there are terrorist crimes with effects a bit more drawn out that are more extreme, unfortunately. Nevertheless, it's a historic event because there was a change. The change was the direction in which the guns were pointing. That's new. Radically new.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What will happen we don't know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next couple of weeks. Very casually, with no comment, no particular thought about it, that's just kind of normal, here, and in a good part of Europe.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We cannot say much about human affairs with any confidence, but sometimes it is possible. We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war, or there won't be a world—at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Talk titled "A World Without War" at the 2nd World Social Forum, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 31, 2002 .
“Moral equivalence is a term of propaganda that was invented to try to prevent us from looking at the acts for which we are responsible. ...There is no such notion. There are many different dimensions and criteria. For example, there's no moral equivalence between the bombing of the World Trade Center and the destruction of Nicaragua or of El Salvador, of Guatemala. The latter were far worse, by any criterion. So there's no moral equivalence.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Tim Sebastian on BBC News, February 2, 2002 .
“Remember, the U.S. is a powerful state, it's not like Libya. If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The United States hires terrorist states.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Talk titled "Distorted Morality" at Harvard University, February 2002 .
“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.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Harry Kreisler, March 22, 2002 .
“[Q: do you think the Palestinian suicide bombers are freedom fighters or terrorists?] They're terrorists - they're both, actually. They're trying to fight for freedom, but doing it in a totally unacceptable immoral way. Of course they're terrorists. And there's been Palestinian terrorism all the way through. I have always opposed it, I oppose it now. But it's very small as compared with the US-backed Israeli terrorism. Quite typically, violence reflects the means of violence. It's not unusual. State terror is almost always much more extreme than retail terror, and this is no exception.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Tony Jones on Lateline, ABC TV (Australia), April 8, 2002 .
“The Americans didn't even think about the outcome of the bombing, because the Sudanese were so far below contempt as to be not worth thinking about. Suppose I walk down the sidewalk in Cambridge and, without a second thought, step on an ant. That would mean that I regard the ant as beneath contempt, and that's morally worse than if I purposely killed that ant.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Michael Powell in The Washington Post, May 5, 2002
“I choose to live in what I think is the greatest country in the world, which is committing horrendous terrorist acts and should stop.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Debate with Bill Bennett on CNN, May 30, 2002
“Armies usually aren't interested in wars. They like preparation for war. But they have an understandable reluctance to fight a war. So I think if you look at, at least the history that I know, it's usually the civilian leadership who is pushing the military to do something. It was the case in the early days of the Vietnam War.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Hugh Gusterson, November 2000 .
“We certainly shouldn't trust to deal with [Saddam Hussein] anyone who supported him through his worst crimes, that's insane.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known. It's called sugar. If you look at the history of imperialism, a lot of it has to do with that. A lot of the imperial conquest, say in the Caribbean, set up a kind of a network... The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans, and it was done largely to pacify working people in England who were being driven into awful circumstances by the early industrial revolution. That's why so many wars took place around the Caribbean.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Take any country that has laws against hate crimes, inspiring hatred and genocide and so on. The first thing they would do is ban the Old Testament. There's nothing like it in the literary canon that exalts genocide, to that extent. And it's not a joke either. Like where I live, New England, the people who liberated it from the native scourge were religious fundamentalist lunatics, who came waving the holy book, declaring themselves to be the children of Israel who are killing the Amalekites, like God told them.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Q: when do you think is it right to intervene in the affairs of another nation?] I think there are conditions under which that would be possible. One basic condition is that nonviolent -- you mean violent intervention? -- that nonviolent means have been exhausted. That's one condition. A second condition is that the people of the country in which you're intervening support the intervention. Under those conditions -- and you can think of others -- intervention would be justified. However, we don't ever apply those conditions.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview by Francine Stock on BBC Four (UK), January 2003