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 consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a ''vanguard'' party, or a State bureaucracy. (Noam Chomsky)
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world. (Noam Chomsky)
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune. (Noam Chomsky)
Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way. (Noam Chomsky)
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss. (Noam Chomsky)
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. (Noam Chomsky)
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Noam Chomsky)
To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public. (Noam Chomsky)
The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival. (Noam Chomsky)
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. (Noam Chomsky)
Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion. (Noam Chomsky)
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. (Noam Chomsky)
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion. (Noam Chomsky)
The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert. (Noam Chomsky)