Noam Chomsky citations (371 citations, Page 11)

Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s, Talk at University of California, Berkeley, 1984
Contexte: On September 1st of last year, the Soviet Union shot down Korean KAL 007, killing 269 people, and the immediate response here was that this proves that the Russians are the most barbaric people since Attila the Hun or something, and therefore we have to step up the attack against Nicaragua, set in MX missiles, put Pershings in West Germany, and increase the military system.… The story was given unbelievable coverage. Not only the story, but the American government interpretation of it, which is roughly what I've just said, was given the kind of coverage that I doubt has ever been given to any story in history.… Right in the middle of all of this furor about the Korean airliner, on November 11th in fact, there was a 100 word item in the New York Times devoted to the interesting fact that UNITA—which is a group that we call "freedom fighters", supported by us and South Africa, in Angola—they took credit for shooting down a civilian Angolan jet, killing 126 people.… Now, under the very confused circumstances of KAL 007, if that was the worst atrocity in human history, well, what about the freedom fighters that we support along with South Africa, who did something much worse?

“…evidence-based approach, the U. S. negotiators argued, is interference with free markets, because corporations must have the right to deceive. […] The claim itself is kind of amusing, I mean, even if you believe the free market rhetoric for a moment. The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That's what's so wonderful about it. But that's the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that, which brings us back to the viability of American democracy. For many years, elections here, election campaigns, have been run by the public relations industry and each time it's with increasing sophistication. And quite naturally, the industry uses the same technique to sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs. The point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information, and similarly, to undermine democracy by the same method, projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information. The candidates are trained, carefully trained, to project a certain image. Intellectuals like to make fun of George Bush's use of phrases like “misunderestimate,” and so on, but my strong suspicion is that he's trained to do that. He's carefully trained to efface the fact that he's a spoiled frat boy from Yale, and to look like a Texas roughneck kind of ordinary guy just like you, just waiting to get back to the ranch that they created for him…”

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25th anniversary of the International Relations Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 26, 2005
Quotes 2000s, 2005

“The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that's happening.”

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Quotes 2000s, 2005, Interview by Steve Scher on KUOW, 2004

“If Hitler had been a crook… We're very fortunate in the United States, we've never had a charismatic leader who weren't a gangster. Every one of them was a thug, or a robber, or something. Which is fine, then they don't cause a lot of trouble. If you get one who's honest, like Hitler, then you're in trouble - they just want power.”

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Interview by Matthew Rothschild, 1997 http://www.freespeech.org/fscm2/contentviewer.php?content_id=727
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999

“By comparative standards, the country is undertaxed. And it's also regressively taxed, the tax burden falls mostly on the poor. What we need is a progressive tax system, of, incidentally, the kind that Jefferson advocated. You know, traditional libertarians, like Jefferson, advocated sharply progressive taxes, because they wanted a system of relative equality, knowing that that's a prerequisite for democracy. Jefferson specifically advocated it. We don't have it anymore, it's sort of there in legislation but it's gone. What we need is different social policies. And social policies which ought to be funded by the people who are going to benefit from it, that's the general public. So we'd be a lot better off if we were higher taxed, and it was used for proper purposes. And we know what those are. I mean, for example, for women taking care of children. You know, it makes sense to pay them for that work, they're doing important work for the society. [applause] And they should be paid for it, but that requires tax payments. And the same is true about protection of the environment.”

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Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Education and Democracy, 1995

“[This view is contrasted with all forms of Empiricism, by which it is] assumed that development is uniform across (cognitive) domains, and that the intrinsic properties of the initial state (of the mind) are homogeneous and undifferentiated - an assumption found across a spectrum reaching from Skinner to Piaget”

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

“Venezuela’s political polarization is not new; the country has long been divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. But the polarization has deepened in recent years. This is partly due to US support for an opposition strategy aimed at removing the government of Nicolás Maduro through extra-electoral means. While the opposition has been divided on this strategy, US support has backed hardline opposition sectors in their goal of ousting the Maduro government through often violent protests, a military coup d’etat, or other avenues that sidestep the ballot box.”

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Quotes 2010s, 2019, Open Letter by Over 70 Scholars and Experts Condemns US-Backed Coup Attempt in Venezuela

“The United States government must cease interfering in Venezuela’s internal politics, especially for the purpose of overthrowing the country’s government. Actions by the Trump administration and its allies in the hemisphere are almost certain to make the situation in Venezuela worse, leading to unnecessary human suffering, violence, and instability.”

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Quotes 2010s, 2019, Open Letter by Over 70 Scholars and Experts Condemns US-Backed Coup Attempt in Venezuela

“The Democrats… gave Trump a huge gift. In fact, they may have handed him the next election. That’s just a—that’s a matter of being so unwilling to deal with fundamental issues, that they’re looking for something on the side that will somehow give political success. The real issues are different things. They’re things like climate change, like global warming, like the Nuclear Posture Review, deregulation. These are real issues. But the Democrats aren’t going after those. They’re looking for something else—the Democratic establishment. I’m not talking about the young cohort that’s coming in, which is quite different. Just all of that has to be shifted significantly, if there’s going to be a legitimate political opposition to the right-wing drift that’s taking place. And it can happen, can definitely happen, but it’s going to take work.”

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Chomsky: By Focusing on Russia, Democrats Handed Trump a “Huge Gift” & Possibly the 2020 Election, DemocracyNow https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/27/chomsky_by_focusing_on_russia_democrats (27 May 2019)
Quotes 2010s, 2019, By Focusing on Russia, Democrats Handed Trump a “Huge Gift”

“If the population allows it to proceed, it’s just going to go on and on like this. Until the next crash — which is so much expected that credit agencies, which evaluate the status of firms, are now counting into their calculations the taxpayer bailout that they expect to come after the next crash… Everywhere you look, policies are designed this way, which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone. That’s what happens when you put power into the hands of a narrow sector of wealth, which is dedicated to increasing power for itself — just as you’d expect.”

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Quoted by Bill Moyers in In His New Book, Noam Chomsky Takes a Look at Income Inequality, https://billmoyers.com/story/noam-chomskys-requiem-american-dream/ (11 May 2017)
Quotes 2010s, 2017, Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power ,

“WikiLeaks … compromised the security that governments are usually concerned about: their security from inspection by their own populations.”

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Noam Chomsky livre Power Systems

Source: Quotes 2010s, 2013, Power Systems, p. 109

“It’s certainly true that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, and also without the people who supported him through his worst atrocities, and are now telling us about them.”

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

“Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order.”

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London: Pluto, 1996.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Powers and Prospects (1996)

“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.”

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

“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.”

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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?

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

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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?

“[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.”

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

“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."”

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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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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...”

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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, [...]”

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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.”

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"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