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Noam Chomsky Quotes

Total quotes: 24
“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.”
— Noam Chomsky
Tagged: Students, loans, student loan, Debt, Society, system
“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.’”
— Noam Chomsky, Grief One Day at a Time: 365 Meditations to Help You Heal After Loss
Tagged: Optimism, Healing
“Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.”
— Noam Chomsky, Media Control
Tagged: Hypocrisy
“It’s very important for institutions of concentrated power to keep people alone and isolated: that way they’re ineffective, they can’t defend themselves against indoctrination, they can’t even figure out what they think.”
— Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky
“I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative justices.”
— Noam Chomsky, Human Nature: Justice versus Power
Tagged: When Is Violence Appropriate?, Fighting Back, The Nuances of Non-Violence
“Large corporations have resources to influence media and overwhelm the political process, and do so accordingly.”
— Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order
Tagged: Capitalism, Big Companies, Corporatism, Media Manipulation
“The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.”
— Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order
Tagged: Democracy, Muddle Policy
“The countries that have developed economically are those which were not colonized by the West; every country that was colonized by the West is a total wreck.”
— Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky
Tagged: Power, The West, Colonization
“The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!”
— Noam Chomsky, theguardian.com
Tagged: Communications, Evolution, Technological Time, Understanding Time, History Of Communication
“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.”
— Noam Chomsky, Media Control, Second Edition: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Open Media Series)
Tagged: Propaganda, Thought Control
“Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.”
— Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects
Tagged: Rich People
“Interviewer: You have been very critical of the press. What would you like the press to do?

Noam Chomsky: It’s very simple. I’d like the press to tell the truth about important things.”
— Noam Chomsky, A Roadmap to a Just World — People Reanimating Democracy
Tagged: Press, Media
“What are called opinions ‘on the left’ and ‘on the right’ in the media represent only a limited spectrum of debate, which reflects the range of needs of private power—but there’s essentially nothing beyond those ‘acceptable’ positions.”
— Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky
Tagged: Opinions, Political Landscapes, Limited Debate
“Donald Trump is a clown — literally, he could be in the circus. He’s getting huge support from people who are angry at everything. Mostly white males. Working-class, middle-class, poor white males. And their wives and traditional families. They are furious about everything.”
— Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky slams Trump: ‘He’s a clown — literally, he could be in the circus’
Tagged: Donald Trump, Clowns, Election 2016, Politicians As Clowns
“You know better than I do what has to be done, the kind of problems you face. Just got ahead and do what has to be done. Don’t be intimidated, don’t be frightened, and recognize that the future can be in our hands if we’re willing to grasp it.”
— Noam Chomsky, Corporate business models are hurting American universities
Tagged: Get To Work, Your Mission, Your Life Purpose, Your Meaning, Inspirational
“The U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit—indeed, encourage—spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness.”
— Herman Edward, Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Tagged: Media, Quiet Power, U.S Media
“The technical structure of the media virtually compels adherence to conventional thoughts; nothing else can be expressed between two commercials, or in seven hundred words, without the appearance of absurdity that is difficult to avoid when one is challenging familiar doctrine with no opportunity to develop facts or argument.”
— Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Tagged: Media, Revolution
“You know, we have little bits of understanding, glimpses, a little bit of light here and there, but there’s a tremendous amount of darkness, which is a challenge. I think life would be pretty boring if we understood everything. It’s better if we don’t understand anything… and know that we don’t, that’s the important part.”
— Noam Chomsky
Tagged: Knowledge, Science, Understanding, Understanding Life
“You can be pretty confident that as conflicts develop, they will become more extremist. The most brutal, harshest groups will take over. That’s what happens when violence becomes the means of interaction. It’s almost automatic. That’s true in neighborhoods, it’s true in international affairs. That’s where ISIS comes from. If the West manages to destroy ISIS, they will have something more extreme on their hands.”
— Noam Chomsky, The World of Our Grandchildren: Noam Chomsky discusses ISIS, Israel, climate change, and the kind of world future generations may inherit
Tagged: ISIS, The Extremism of ISIS, Extremism, Violence as Communication, On Violence
“John Pilger: Does that right of free expression, in your view, extent to everybody?  

Noam Chomsky: I mean, if we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. 

John Pilger: Would you support the right of terrorists calling for murder of Salman Rushdie to speak in that way? 

Noam Chomsky: To speak yes, but I think that Bentham’s standard is the one that should be observed… Suppose you and I walk into a store and you have a gun and I tell you to shoot the store owner. Well, that’s speech but it’s not protected because that’s speech which is part of a violent act. 

John Pilger: But shouldn’t that be, as in the case of the racist being allowed to speak, shouldn’t that be simply, and indeed it is in this country, illegal. I mean it’s incitement to murder. 

Noam Chomsky: You have to ask whether it is incitement to imminent violent action. Now you know there’s no precise litmus test that tells you where to draw the line. But freedom of speech is an important enough to value so that you need an extraordinary argument to overcome it. I think there are such cases. I gave one. For example, somebody who says ‘shoot' when someone else has a gun. OK. That’s crossing the line. But I don’t think there are many cases that cross the line.”
— Noam Chomsky, Freedom of Speech: Words are Not Deeds
Tagged: Freedom of Speech, Crossing The Line
“ I am just old enough to remember those chilling and ominous days of Germany’s descent from decency to Nazi barbarism, to borrow the words of the distinguished scholar of German history Fritz Stern. He tells us that he has the future of the United States in mind when he reviews ‘a historic process in which resentment against a disenchanted secular world found deliverance in the ecstatic escape of unreason.’”
— Noam Chomsky, The Radical Intellectual
Tagged: The Seduction of Unreason, Fitz Stern, Germany, Unreason
“The steady advance, and cultural power, of marketing and advertising has caused 'the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture.' And it has had the effect of creating a world of virtual communities built by advertisers and based on demographics and taste differences of consumers. These consumption- and style-based clusters are at odds with physical communities that share a social life and common concerns and which participate in a democratic order. These virtual communities are organized to buy and sell goods, not to create or service a public sphere.”
— Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
Tagged: The Impossibility Of 21st Century Politics, Detachment, Politics As Entertainment, Advertising, The Uprooting
“Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it's necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything - that's part of how you teach people they can't do anything, they're helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.”
— Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky
Tagged: Power
“One of the striking examples was the invasion of Iraq. U.S. and British intelligence agencies informed their governments that the invasion of Iraq was likely to lead to an increase in terrorism. They didn’t care. In fact, it did. Terrorism increased by a factor of seven the first year after the Iraqi invasion, according to government statistics. Right now the government is defending the massive surveillance operation. That’s on the front pages. The defense is on grounds that we have to do it to apprehend terrorists.”
— Noam Chomsky, A Roadmap to a Just World — People Reanimating Democracy
Tagged: Iraq, Terrorism
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