Noam Chomsky Quotes

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Noam Chomsky

Profession : Activist

Birth : December 7, 1928

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

Noam Chomsky

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

Noam Chomsky

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

Noam Chomsky

As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states - no more, no less.

Noam Chomsky

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

Noam Chomsky

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.

Noam Chomsky

Israel is following policies which maximise its security threats... policies which choose expansion over security... policies which lead to their moral degradation, their isolation, their delegitimation, as they call it now, and very likely ultimate destruction. That's not impossible.

Noam Chomsky

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

Noam Chomsky

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

Noam Chomsky

If you don't like what someone has to say, argue with them.

Noam Chomsky

The 'peace movement' exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

Noam Chomsky

Palestinians have no wealth or power.

Noam Chomsky

It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

Noam Chomsky

NATO was constructed on the - with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?

Noam Chomsky

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

Noam Chomsky

I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.

Noam Chomsky

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Noam Chomsky

If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.

Noam Chomsky

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.

Noam Chomsky

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

Noam Chomsky