Noam Chomsky Quotes
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Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "the father of modern linguistics," Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and laureate professor at the University of Arizona.

Born to middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. At the age of 16 he began studies at the University of Pennsylvania, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. From 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard University's Society of Fellows, where he developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he was awarded his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, in 1957 emerging as a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which remodeled the scientific study of language, while from 1958 to 1959 he was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of behaviorism, being particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.

An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky attracted widespread public attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon's Enemies List. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the Linguistics Wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later co-wrote an analysis articulating the propaganda model of media criticism, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Additionally, his defense of unconditional freedom of speech – including for Holocaust deniers – generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the early 1980s. Following his retirement from active teaching, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the War on Terror and supporting the Occupy movement.

One of the most cited scholars in history, Chomsky has influenced a broad array of academic fields. He is widely recognized as a paradigm shifter who helped spark a major revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. In addition to his continued scholarly research, he remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberalism and contemporary state capitalism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mainstream news media. His ideas have proved highly significant within the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements, but have also drawn criticism, with some accusing Chomsky of anti-Americanism.

✵ 7. December 1928   •   Other names Avram Noam Chomsky, Ноам Чомский, Ноам Хомский
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Noam Chomsky: 334   quotes 72   likes

Noam Chomsky Quotes

“Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.”

Source: Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1970s, Government in the Future, 1970, p. 140.

“As soon as one identifies, challenges and overcomes illegitimate power, he or she is an anarchist. Most people are anarchists.”

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Zeit Campus;
Quotes 2010s, 2011
Context: [ZEIT Campus: You often say you are an anarchist. What do you mean by that? ] Chomsky: Students should challenge authorities and join a long anarchist tradition. [ZEIT Campus: “Challenge authorities” – a liberal or a moderate leftist could accept that invitation. ] Chomsky: As soon as one identifies, challenges and overcomes illegitimate power, he or she is an anarchist. Most people are anarchists. What they call themselves doesn’t matter to me. [ZEIT Campus: Who or what must challenge today’s student generation? ] Chomsky: This world is full of suffering, distress, violence and catastrophes. Students must decide: does something concern you or not? I say: look around, analyze the problems, ask yourself what you can do and set out on the work!

“Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a "war against terrorism."”

9-11, 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20061015103427/http://indymedia.org.nz/usermedia/application/2/9-11.pdf
Quotes 2000s, 2001

“Roughly speaking, states are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power…”

Noam Chomsky, letter dated June 13, 1983. Published in: " The reasons for my concern: Response to Celia Jakubowicz http://www.chomsky.info/letters/19830613.htm," in C. P. Otero (ed.), Language and Politics, Black Rose, 1988, pp. 369-72.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s

“In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine. His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years, the United States had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out, it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to, certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical, that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the Pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell Doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of the reasons why the U. S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty. U. S. military doctrine is that U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say, Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of casualties, and they don't like it. But U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a massacre. According to the U. S., I don't know the actual numbers, but according to U. S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention was approximately in the same ballpark. That's Somalia. That's what's given as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention.”

Responding to the question, "what did the United States have to gain by intervening in Somalia?", regarding Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of Mogadishu.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Sovereignty and World Order, 1999

“In order to make it look dramatic, they staged what was ridiculed by some Israeli commentators, correctly, they staged a national trauma… There was a huge media extravaganza, you know, pictures of a little Jewish boy try to hold back the soldiers destroying his house… And a lot of the settlers were allowed in, so there could be a pretense of violence, though there wasn't any… The withdrawal could have been done perfectly quietly. All that was necessary was for Israel to announce that on August 1st the army will withdraw. And immediately the settlers, who had been subsidized to go there in the first place, and to stay there, would get on to the trucks that are provided for them and move over to the West Bank where they can move into new subsidized settlements. But if you did that way, there wouldn't have been any national trauma, any justification for saying, "never can we give up another 1 mm² of land". What made all of this even more ridiculous was that it was a repetition of what was described in Haaretz as "Operation National Truama 1982". After Israel finally agreed to Sadat's 1971 offer, they had to evacuate northeastern Sinai, and there was another staged trauma, which again was ridiculed by Israel commentators. By a miracle, none of the settlers who were resisting needed a Band-Aid, while Palestinians were being killed all over the place.”

Talk titled "The Current Crisis in the Middle East" at MIT, September 21, 2006 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/403/
Quotes 2000s, 2006

“We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

"Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death" http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/noam_chomsky_my_reaction_to_os/, Guernica, 6 May 2011.
Quotes 2010s, 2011

“I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled.”

Interview by Svetlana Vukovic & Svetlana Lukic on Radio B92, Belgrade, Serbia, September 19, 2001 http://www.b92.net/intervju/eng/2001/0919-chomsky.phtml.
Quotes 2000s, 2001

“The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. Straight-out war crime.”

Quotes 2000s, 2004, Interview by Bill Maher, 2004

“The Americans didn't even think about the outcome of the bombing, because the Sudanese were so far below contempt as to be not worth thinking about. Suppose I walk down the sidewalk in Cambridge and, without a second thought, step on an ant. That would mean that I regard the ant as beneath contempt, and that's morally worse than if I purposely killed that ant.”

Interview by Michael Powell in the Washington Post, May 5, 2002 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2002/05/05/an-eminence-with-no-shades-of-gray/7fbaf1b5-ce87-45e3-a84f-604c61bb378e/?utm_term=.e1d833548377
Quotes 2000s, 2002

“If we try to keep a sense of balance, the exposures of the past several months are analogous to the discovery that the directors of Murder, Inc. were also cheating on their income tax. Reprehensible, to be sure, but hardly the main point.”

" Watergate: A Skeptical View http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19730920.htm," New York Review of Books, September 20, 1973.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1970s

“There's a good reason why nobody studies history. It just teaches you too much.”

KGNU benefit at the University of Colorado at Boulder, April 5, 2003 (context: João Goulart) http://www.freespeech.org/fsitv/fscm2/contentviewer.php?content_id=299
Quotes 2000s, 2003