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Noam Chomsky: 668 quotes76 likes

“We might add now that we do have an authoritative account of why the United States bombed Serbia in 1999. It comes from Strobe Talbott, now the director of the Brookings Institution, but in 1999 he was in charge of the State Department-Pentagon team that supervised the diplomacy in the affair. He wrote the introduction to a recent book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, which presents the position of the Clinton administration at the time of the bombing. Norris writes that "it was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of Kosovar Albanians - that best explains NATO's war". In brief, they were resisting absorption into the U. S. dominated international socioeconomic system. Talbott adds that thanks to John Norris, anyone interested in the war in Kosovo "will know … how events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were involved" in the war, actually directing it. This authoritative explanation will come as no surprise at all to students of international affairs who are more interested in fact than rhetoric. And it will also come as no surprise, to those familiar with intellectual life, that the attack continues to be hailed as a grand achievement of humanitarian intervention, despite massive Western documentation to the contrary, and now an explicit denial at the highest level; which will change nothing, it's not the way intellectual life works.”

Noam Chomsky

Talk at the Englert Theatre in Iowa, April 10, 2006 http://www.greenteaphd.com/greenteablog/?p=252 Quotes 2000s, 2006

“The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can't be intimidated… Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why — they've been around for 4,000 years, they have contempt for the barbarians, they just don't give a damn. OK, you scream, we'll go ahead and take over a big piece of Saudi or Iranian oil. And that's the threat, you can't intimidate them — it's driving people in Washington berserk. But, you know, of all the major powers, they've been the least aggressive militarily.”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 2000s, 2006, Discussion with Robert Trivers, 2006

“Obama's now conducting the world's greatest international terrorist campaign – the drones and special forces campaign. It's also a terror-generating campaign. The common understanding at the highest level [is] that these actions generate potential terrorists. I'll quote General Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus' predecessor. He says that "for every innocent person you kill", and there are plenty of them, "you create ten new enemies."”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 2010s, 2013, Speech at DW Global Media Forum

“Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children['s] […] normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand.”

Noam Chomsky

conference titled "Creation & Culture" in Barcelona, Spain, November 25, 1992 https://web.archive.org/web/20031123171255/http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/5/7.html. Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994

“I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.”

Noam Chomsky

Interview by Andrew Marr on BBC2, February 14, 1996 https://web.archive.org/web/19990930034218/http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/9602-big-idea.html. Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999

“Dayan's correct assumption was that the boss in Washington might object formally, but with a wink, and would continue to provide the decisive military, economic and diplomatic support for the criminal endeavors. The criminality has been underscored by repeated Security Council resolutions, more recently by the International Court of Justice, with the basic agreement of U. S. Justice Thomas Buergenthal in a separate declaration. Israel's actions also violate U. N. Security Council resolutions concerning Jerusalem. But everything is fine as long as Washington winks.”

Noam Chomsky

Article The Charade of Israeli-Palestinian Talks for Truthout newsletter, December 6, 2010 http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20101206.htm. Quotes 2010s, 2010

“[The "liberal media"] love to be denounced from the right, and the right loves to denounce them, because that makes them look like courageous defenders of freedom and independence while, in fact, they are imposing all of the presuppositions of the propaganda system.”

Noam Chomsky

Interview by Ira Shorr, February 11, 1996 http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19960211.htm Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999

“In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice, whatever one may think of the competing claims. Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin.”

Noam Chomsky

Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood http://books.google.nl/books?id=gtNtAAAAMAAJ, 1974, p. 54. Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1970s

“I mentioned the Magna Carta. That’s the foundations of modern law. We will soon be commemorating the 800th anniversary. We won’t be celebrating it – more likely interring what little is left of its bones after the flesh has been picked off by Bush and Obama and their colleagues in Europe.”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 2010s, 2013, Speech at DW Global Media Forum

“It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.”

Noam Chomsky

Talk titled "The World After September 11th", AFSC Conference at Tufts University, Massachusetts, December 8, 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20011230091612/http://www.zmag.org/chomskyafter911.htm. Quotes 2000s, 2001

“As for drugs, my impression is that their effect was almost completely negative, simply removing people from meaningful struggle and engagement. Just the other day I was sitting in a radio studio waiting for a satellite arrangement abroad to be set up. The engineers were putting together interviews with Bob Dylan from about 1966-7 or so (judging by the references), and I was listening (I'd never heard him talk before — if you can call that talking). He sounded as though he was so drugged he was barely coherent, but the message got through clearly enough through the haze. He said over and over that he'd been through all of this protest thing, realized it was nonsense, and that the only thing that was important was to live his own life happily and freely, not to "mess around with other people's lives" by working for civil and human rights, ending war and poverty, etc. He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley "free speech movement" and said that he didn't understand it. He said something like: "I have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me. Period."”

Noam Chomsky

If the capitalist PR machine [term used in the question] wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn't have made a better choice. Reply (via email) to Douglas Lain, June 1994 https://web.archive.org/web/20021214024709/http://www.douglaslain.com/diet-soap.html Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994

“For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the propaganda system to which we are subjected and in which all too often we serve as unwilling or unwitting instruments.”

Noam Chomsky

"Propaganda, American-style" http://www.zpub.com/un/chomsky.html in Propaganda Review, 1987. Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s

“There is a history of Christianity: the first three centuries of Christianity, it was a radical pacifist religion, which is why it was persecuted. It was the religion of the poor and the suffering, and Jesus was the symbol of the poor and the suffering. …
In the fourth century, it was taken over by the Roman Empire. Emperor Constantine turned the church into the religion of the persecutors.”

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky on Religion (2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNDG7ErY-k4&feature=related. Quotes 2010s, 2010

“…the argument is that by bombing at a time when most of the atrocities were attributed to the KLA guerrillas, with the anticipation that the bombing would lead to far worse atrocities, NATO was preventing atrocities. The fact that this is the strongest argument that can be contrived by serious analysts, and I stress serious because there's plenty of nonsense, that tells us a good deal about the decision to bomb, particularly when we recall that there apparently were diplomatic options.”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 2000s, 2005, Illegal but Legitimate: A Dubious Doctrine for the Times, 2004

“The big debate in Washington is totally pointless. And the media, about whether Bush downgraded terror in order to invade Iraq. There's nothing to debate. He invaded Iraq. That proves beyond doubt that he downgraded the threat of terror in favor of invading Iraq. They anticipated, and their own intelligence agencies told them, and everyone else did too, that invasion of Iraq was likely to increase the threat of terror. It's not a high priority, so they invaded Iraq because that's much higher priority.”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 2000s, 2004, Talk at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, 2004

“Intrinsic (psychological) structure is rich... and diverse.”

Noam Chomsky

Source: Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s, Rules and Representations (1980), p. 3 as cited in: Jerry Fodor (1983).

“In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion—a minimal respect for facts and logic—has been virtually abandoned.”

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky interviewed by an anonymous interviewer, October 26, 1981; Published in: " The Treachery of the Intelligentsia: A French Travesty http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19811026.htm " in C. P. Otero (ed.), Language and Politics, Black Rose, 1988, pp. 312-323. Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s

“I was very much involved in the resistance movement in the 1960's. In fact, I was just barely -- the only reason I missed a long jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were called off.”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 2000s, 2004, 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action, 2004

“It is not that I am not a fan of American exceptionalism. That is like saying I am not a fan of the moon being made out of green cheese—it does not exist. Powerful states have quite typically considered themselves to be exceptionally magnificent, and the United States is no exception to that. The basis for it ["it" meaning American exceptionalism] is not very substantial to put it politely. The problems with American foreign policy are rooted in its central nature, which we know about or can know about if we want to.”

Noam Chomsky

Interview with The Young Turks, October 26, 2010 https://chomsky.info/20101026/ Quotes 2010s, 2010

“Incidentally, I don't say it [the US electoral system] is a charade; there are differences in the parties—I don’t think they're great differences, but they're real, and small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences.”

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, Al Jazeera ‘UpFront’ interview with host Mehdi Hasan concerning the 2016 US Presidential Election, (Jan 30, 2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btJfkPBLULg Quotes 2010s, 2016