Noam Chomsky Quotes

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Noam Chomsky

Profession : Activist

Birth : December 7, 1928

The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital - in some cases, overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations.

Noam Chomsky

Iran has little capacity to deploy force. Its strategic doctrines are defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to set it.

Noam Chomsky

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

Noam Chomsky

One of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics, as he calls it - very outstanding political economist - which essentially - I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state.

Noam Chomsky

You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India.

Noam Chomsky

Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don't just succumb.

Noam Chomsky

Unlike Iran, Israel refuses to allow inspections at all, refuses to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has hundreds of nuclear weapons, has advanced delivery systems.

Noam Chomsky

Control is the source of strategic power.

Noam Chomsky

Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn't have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.

Noam Chomsky

In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti - France and the United States - combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The U.S. denies him permission to return to the entire region.

Noam Chomsky

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress 'suspects.'

Noam Chomsky

The U.S. is off the spectrum in religious commitment.

Noam Chomsky

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

Noam Chomsky

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

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

Noam Chomsky

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

Noam Chomsky

In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.

Noam Chomsky

Governments don't control people like they used to.

Noam Chomsky

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

Noam Chomsky

I don't like the intellectual label.

Noam Chomsky