QUOTES by Noam Chomsky
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“That is the nature of being well educated. It is to accept the framework of power and not question it.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Management,” according to the neorealists, means maintaining the conflict as “a low intensity confrontation”—which means the loss of local, human lives, without any damage to the mediating superpower.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Morris Halle was already working on a generative phonology of Russian in the 1950s, and we also worked together on the generative phonology of English, at first jointly with Fred Lukoff.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“stupid orders for years and years—that’s the way I did it, for example. Like, you’re told by some stupid teacher, “Do this,” which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“People are called intellectuals because they're privileged. It's not because they're smart or they know a lot. There are plenty of people who know more and are smarter but aren't intellectuals because they don't have the privilege. The people called intellectuals are privileged. They have resources and opportunities, and enough freedom has been won so that they state does not have an unrestrained capacity to repress”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“We're taught to talk about the world as a world of as states conceived as unified, coherent entities. If you study international relations (IR) theory, there's what's called "realist" IR theory, which says there is an anarchic world of states and states pursue their "national interest." It's in large part mythology. There are a few common interests, like we don't want to be destroyed. But, for the most part, people within a nation have very different interests. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“I mean, it's nice to have the laws, but it's nice partly because it makes it easier to struggle for your rights-it's not that the laws give you the rights. Laws can be on the books and mean absolutely nothing”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“No, there is no real Left now. If you are just counting heads, there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they are atomized, committed to different special interests—gay rights, environmental rights, this, that. They don’t coalesce into a movement that can really do things.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“I don't have anything against bulldozers; I think they're great. It's a lot better than digging with a shovel.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“essential differences between generative grammar and structural linguistics.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to—rather than alleviate—material and cultural deficit. If”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Like, we can have big discussions about what society ought to look like in the future, which is fine, but that doesn't affect what happens to people in their lives right now, except extremely indirectly. What happens to people in their daily lives usually depends on small, difficult, tactical assessments about where to put your time and energy”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“...the educational systems are oriented to maintaining the existing social and economic structures instead of transforming them”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“If you want to traumatize people, treason trials are an extreme way—if there are spies running around in our midst, then we’re really in trouble, we’d better just listen to the government and stop thinking.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“The invasion was undertaken with the expectation that it probably would increase the threat of terror. That was the advice given by the government’s own intelligence agencies and by others, by lots of specialists on terror, who said it was very likely to increase terror, for”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Tis to work and have such pay As just keeps life from day to day In your limbs, as in a cell For the tyrants’ use to dwell, … ’Tis to be slave in soul And to hold no strong control Over your own wills, but be All that others make of ye.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Yes, it's simple, really. If you're riding a bicycle and you don't want to fall off, you have to keep going - fast.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“The very concept of social planning, of rational planning for human concerns—that's regarded as virtually subversive. And that's the only thing that could possibly save people: rational social planning, carried out by accountable people representing the whole population rather than business elites. Democracy, in other words—that's a concept we don't have.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“appeal to non-business interests) and let them be effective. Although there is marked and frequently observed dissatisfaction with the Republicans and Democrats, electoral politics is one area where notions of competition and free choice have little meaning.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Yeah, it's a bum rap, basically―it's like referring to Soviet-style bureaucracy as "socialism," or any other term of discourse that's been given a second meaning for the purpose of ideological warfare. I mean, "chaos" is a meaning of the word, but it's not a meaning that has any relevance to social thought. Anarchy as a social philosophy has never meant "chaos"―in fact, anarchists have typically believed in a highly organized society, just one that's organized democratically from below.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“If American opinion has been uninformed, misinformed and prejudiced, the missionaries are largely to blame. Interpreting history in terms of the advance of Christianity, they have given an inadequate, distorted, and occasionally a grotesque picture of Moslems and Islam.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
... When we hear American officials speaking of freedom, democracy and such values, they make terms like these sound obscene.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“A well-known Egyptian academic traces hostility towards the US to its support for 'every possible anti-democratic government in the Arab-Islamic world.....
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“The people who are known are riding the crest of some wave. Now, you can ride the crest of the wave and try to use it to get power, which is the standard thing, or you can ride the crest of the wave because you're helping people that way, which is another thing. But the point is, it's the wave that matters”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“truisms at least have the merit of being true, which distinguishes them from a good deal of political discourse. And”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can't afford the time to think.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based mandarin class, remain in power no matter whom you elect.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“In fact, what’s been happening is that there’s been a flow of investor funds to the United States, to Treasury securities, which are regarded as a safe haven now, which has a mixed effect for the United States.3 It tends over time to raise the value of the dollar and harm exports. So it’s not good for a healthy economy.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Kant’s insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Both parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period of the past generation. Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a “radical insurgency” that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics. With”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“In the modern period, similar ideas are reiterated, for example, by an important political thinker who described what he called “a definite trend in the historic development of mankind,” which strives for “the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.” The author was Rudolf Rocker, a leading twentieth-century anarchist thinker and activist.3 He was outlining an anarchist tradition culminating in his view in anarcho-syndicalism—in European terms, a variety of “libertarian socialism.” These”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“..And ever since then, every time popular movements have succeeded in dissolving power to a certain extent, there has been a deepening recognition amount elites in the west that as you begin to lose the power to control people by force you have to start to control what they think.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“At their most eloquent, proponents of neoliberalism sound as if they are doing poor people, the environment, and everybody else a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few. The”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Consciousness is some kind of peripheral thing which picks up some of what's going on in our head.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“If you read British Foreign Office records from the 1940s, it’s clear they recognised that their day in the sun was over and that Britain would have to be the “junior partner” of the United States, and sometimes treated in a humiliating way. A striking example of this was in 1962, the time of the Cuban missile crisis. The Kennedy planners were making some very dangerous choices and pursuing policies which they thought had a good chance of leading to nuclear war, and they knew that Britain would be wiped out. The US wouldn’t, because Russia’s missiles couldn’t reach there, but Britain would be wiped out.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“From Ferguson to Athens, via Mexico, it is clear that many governments are reproducing the tools that Israel uses to repress and oppress the Palestinians. The replication of those same tactics, methods, and often weapons serves as proof that the Palestinians are now used as guinea pigs for experimentation.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“In my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to dismantle them in a much more free society.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time—it refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“See, whether you have seditious libel is sort of at the core of whether it's a free society or not: if you're not allowed to criticize the government, if you can be punished for assaulting the government with words, even if that's in the background somewhere, the society is not really free. And truth is no defense to this kind of libel charge, keep in mind-in fact, traditionally truth makes the crime worse, because if what you're saying is true, then the undermining of state authority is even worse.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“By now, they rank people by income level or wages roughly the same: The bottom seventy per cent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“The need to humiliate those who raise their heads is an ineradicable element of the imperial mentality. In”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“the masters represent “the national interest,” like those who applauded themselves for leading the country to war “after the utmost deliberation by the more thoughtful members of the community” had reached its “moral verdict.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“People want to explore, we want to press our capacities to their limits, we want to appreciate what we can. But the joy of creation is something very few people get the opportunity to have in our society: artists get to have it, craftspeople have it, scientists.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky
“If you don't recognize your own crimes, there's no impediment to continuing them. There's a pretty dramatic example of that right at this moment. This happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's decision to launch the war against South Vietnam. Forgetting the fiftieth anniversary of the launching of one of the major atrocities in post-Second World War history is pretty severe. But almost nobody has noticed it. I don't think we'll hear a word about it. And, yes, that opens the way to further aggression.”
Quote by -Noam Chomsky