Noam Chomsky Quotes (33 Quotes)


    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.

    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.

    Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

    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.

    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.


    As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

    If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.


    To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

    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.

    Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

    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.

    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.

    If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

    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.

    The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.

    Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

    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.

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

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

    The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

    If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

    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.

    States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

    Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century.

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

    You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

    Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

    I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

    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.

    Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

    In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.

    The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.


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