20 Most Famous Noam Chomsky Quotes
Noam Chomsky (born 7 December 1928) is an American professor of linguistics, anarchist, human rights activist, socialist and political analyst.
There are 20 Most Famous Noam Chomsky Quotes:
Noam Chomsky Quotes
1. If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
― Noam Chomsky
2. If the media were honest, they would say, Look, here are the interests we represent and this is the framework within which we look at things. This is our set of beliefs and commitments. That’s what they would say, very much as their critics say. For example, I don’t try to hide my commitments, and the Washington Post and New York Times shouldn’t do it either. However, they must do it, because this mask of balance and objectivity is a crucial part of the propaganda function. In fact, they actually go beyond that. They try to present themselves as adversarial to power, as subversive, digging away at powerful institutions and undermining them. The academic profession plays along with this game.
― Noam Chomsky
3. 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.
― Noam Chomsky
4. The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.
― Noam Chomsky
5. For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.
― Noam Chomsky
6. Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.
― Noam Chomsky
7. Education is really aimed at helping students get to the point where they can learn on their own. . .
― Noam Chomsky
8. 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
9. The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.
― Noam Chomsky
10. It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.
― Noam Chomsky
11. 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
12. It is quite possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology. The science-forming capacity is only one facet of our mental endowment. We use it where we can but are not restricted to it, fortunately.
― Noam Chomsky
13. 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.
― Noam Chomsky
14. There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.
― Noam Chomsky
15. It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.
― Noam Chomsky
16. Roughly speaking, states are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power.
― Noam Chomsky
17. Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.
― Noam Chomsky
18. As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
― Noam Chomsky
19. Obama's policies have been approximately the same as Bush's, though there have been some slight differences, but that's not a great surprise. The Democrats supported Bush's policies.
― Noam Chomsky
20. 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
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