Noam Chomsky Quotes

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.

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

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.

Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

If you want to control a population... give them a God to worship.

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can't go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who's sniffing cocaine.

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

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.

Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.

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

Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It's something you have to find out for yourself.

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.

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

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

What's the point of being better than someone else?

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

You are responsible for the predictable consequences of your actions.

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

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

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

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.

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

It's as if we're higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.

He who controls the media controls the minds of the public.

Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy - their own population.

The uniformity and obedience of the media, which any dictator would admire...

Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal

I don't have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

All public resources go to the rich. The poor, if they can survive in the labor market, fine. Otherwise, they die. That's economics in a nutshell.

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

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

It’s a shameful moment for U.S. media when it insists on being subservient to the grotesque propaganda agencies of a violent, aggressive state.

A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.

It doesn't matter how much you learn in school; it's whether you learn how to go on and do things by yourself. And that can be done at any level.

If something is repeated over and over as obvious, the chances are that it is obviously false.

Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

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

One of the greatest dangers is secular religion - state worship.

Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it's growth in a sense.

If voting could actually change anything, it would be illegal.

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.