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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
Noam Chomsky photo
Noam Chomsky: 334   quotes 72   likes

Noam Chomsky Quotes

“The U. S. has always insisted on its right to use force, whatever international law requires, and whatever international institutions decide.… The U. S., of course, is not alone in these practices. Other states commonly act in much the same way, if not constrained by external or internal forces.”

Noam Chomsky

PBS, March 12, 1998 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/march98/intervention_3-12.html.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999

Way , Law

“The Crisis, the civilizational crisis of the West at this point is devastating... it does bring up childhood memories of listening to Hitler raving on the radio to raucous crowds... it makes you wonder if this species is even viable.”

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky: Coronavirus - What is at stake? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-N3In2rLI4 | Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) Mar 28, 2020
Quotes 2010s, 2020, Coronavirus - What is at stake?

Childhood , Making love , Memory

“I have a parrot. It can say 'sovereignty to all the people' in Portuguese.”

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky: Coronavirus - What is at stake? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-N3In2rLI4 | Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) Mar 28, 2020
Quotes 2010s, 2020, Coronavirus - What is at stake?

People

“[Third great threat] ...the deterioration of democracy.. the one hope we have for overcoming the crisis... informed, involved public taking control of their fate. If that doesn't happen we're doomed.”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 2010s, 2020, Coronavirus - What is at stake?

Democracy , Hope , Fate

“As the most powerful state, the U.S. makes its own laws, using force and conducting economic warfare at will. It also threatens sanctions against countries that do not abide by its conveniently flexible notions of "free trade."”

Noam Chomsky

In one important case, Washington has employed such threats with great effectiveness (and GATT approval) to force open Asian markets for U.S. tobacco exports and advertising, aimed primarily at the growing markets of women and children. The U.S. Agriculture Department has provided grants to tobacco firms to promote smoking overseas. Asian countries have attempted to conduct educational anti-smoking campaigns, but they are overwhelmed by the miracles of the market, reinforced by U.S. state power through the sanctions threat. Philip Morris, with an advertising and promotion budget of close to $9 billion in 1992, became China's largest advertiser. The effect of Reaganite sanction threats was to increase advertising and promotion of cigarette smoking (particularly U.S. brands) quite sharply in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, along with the use of these lethal substances. In South Korea, for example, the rate of growth in smoking more than tripled when markets for U.S. lethal drugs were opened in 1988. The Bush Administration extended the threats to Thailand, at exactly the same time that the "war on drugs" was declared; the media were kind enough to overlook the coincidence, even suppressing the outraged denunciations by the very conservative Surgeon-General. Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Peto estimates that among Chinese children under 20 today, 50 million will die of cigarette-related diseases, an achievement that ranks high even by 20th century standards.

In Tony Evans (ed.), Human Rights Fifty Years on: A Reappraisal, 1997 https://chomsky.info/199811__/
Quotes 1990s, 1995–1999

Making love , Law , Country

“If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 1990s, 1990–1994, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

Freedom

“States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 1990s, 1990–1994, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

Country

“The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of "Fuck You", so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response. We've long ago reached that level.”

Noam Chomsky

letter to Alexander Cockburn (1 March 1990), later paraphrased in Deterring Democracy (1992) p. 345.
Quotes 1990s, 1990–1994

Truth

“Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: "What kind of peace?"”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 1960s–1980s, 1980s, Talk at University of California, Berkeley, 1984

Peace , Question

“Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That's pretty obvious. You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case...”

Noam Chomsky

Chronicles of Dissent, December 13, 1989 https://web.archive.org/web/20000829081348/http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/db-8912.html
Quotes 1960s–1980s, 1980s

“The uniformity and obedience of the media, which any dictator would admire, [...]”

Noam Chomsky

Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, 1985, p. 275

Commonly rephrased as: "Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media."
Quotes 1960s–1980s, 1980s

“Review by Noam Chomsky: That the Obama phenomenon is of considerable significance in American social and political history should hardly be in doubt. But what exactly is it, and where might it lead? This lucid and penetrating book situates it firmly within the ‘corporate-dominated and militaristic U.S. elections system and political culture,’ explores in depth its substantive content and its limits, and draws valuable lessons about how these might be transcended in the unending struggle to achieve a more just and free society and a peaceful world. It is a very welcome contribution in complex and troubled times.”

Noam Chomsky

"Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics", October 2008, ISBN: 978-1-59451-631-3. In "Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics" by Paul Street https://web.archive.org/web/20110522032935/http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987, 2008.
Quotes 2000s, 2007–09

Peace , Drawing , Time , History

“I should say that when people talk about capitalism it's a bit of a joke. There's no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. That's right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. That's very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World.”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 1990s, 1995–1999, Sovereignty and World Order, 1999

History , Country , Business , War

“Property rights are not like other rights, contrary to what Madison and a lot of modern political theory says. If I have the right to free speech, it doesn't interfere with your right to free speech. But if I have property, that interferes with your right to have that property, you don't have it, I have it. So the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech. This is often put very misleadingly about rights of property; property has no right. But if we just make sense out of this, maybe there is a right to property, one could debate that, but it's very different from other rights.”

Noam Chomsky

Quotes 1990s, 1995–1999, The Common Good (1998)

Sense , Making love , Freedom

“Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.”

Noam Chomsky book Class Warfare

Quotes 1990s, 1995–1999, Class Warfare, 1995

Education , Thinking , People

“Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people, or working people.… Actually, the peak of marijuana use was as I said, in the seventies, but that was rich kids, so you don't throw them in jail. And then it got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw people in jail for it, when it was poor people.”

Noam Chomsky

Dialogue with trade unionists, February 2, 1999 https://web.archive.org/web/20051226071614/http://zpedia.org/Chomsky_on_pot
Quotes 1990s, 1995–1999

Marijuana , People

“[...] one must be cautious in assessing the political significance of the relative freedom from repression — at least for the privileged — in the United States. Exactly what does it mean, concretely?”

Noam Chomsky book Language and Responsibility

Quotes 1950s–1980s, 1970s, Language and Responsibility, Pantheon, 1977

Freedom

“The picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies.”

Noam Chomsky Media Control

Quotes 1990s, 1990–1994, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, (1991)

Truth , Reality , World

“The pathology of Islamophobia is growing throughout the West — it is taking its most lethal form in India.”

Noam Chomsky

Quoted in "India has turned Muslims into a 'persecuted minority': Noam Chomsky" https://www.dawn.com/news/1674696, Dawn, February 12, 2022
Quotes 2020s, 2022