Noam Chomsky Quotes

“Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.”

“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.”

“Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?”

“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.”

“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”

“How it is we have so much information, but know so little?”

“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.”

“I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.”

“If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.”

“If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it.”

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

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

“If you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed not to believe in, and I've never seen an explanation.”

“It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.”

“It is quite possible -- overwhelmingly probable, one might guess --
that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”

“It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.”

“Making a people the instrument of its own oppression is the ultimate degradation.”

“Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.”

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”

“Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.”

“Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.”

“That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.”

“That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.”

“The Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.”

“The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.”

“The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren't being paid for it. It's work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.”

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

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”

“Education is a system of imposed ignorance.”