On Language Quotes

“Compare mathematics and the political sciences—it’s quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“No doubt a propaganda system is more effective when its doctrines are insinuated rather than asserted, when it sets the bounds for possible thought rather than simply imposing a clear and easily identifiable doctrine that one must parrot—or suffer the consequences.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“The real question raised was not: Did Nixon employ evil methods against his political adversaries? but rather: Who were the victims? The answer is clear. Nixon was condemned, not because he employed reprehensible methods in his political struggles, but because he made a mistake in the choice of adversaries against whom he turned these methods. He attacked people with power. ― Noam Chomsky, On Language”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language

“A few months later, in December 1969, the Chicago police conducted a pre-dawn raid on a Panther apartment. Approximately one hundred shots were fired. At first the police claimed that they had responded to the fire of the Panthers, but it was quickly established by the local press that this was false. Fred Hampton, one of the most talented and promising leaders of the Panthers, was killed in his bed. There is evidence that he may have been drugged. Witnesses claim that he was murdered in cold blood. Mark Clark was also killed. This event can fairly be described as a Gestapo-style political assassination.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“The basic function of the FBI is not to stop crime. Rather, it functions as a political police, in large measure.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“In a capitalist society the mass media are capitalist institutions. The fact that these institutions reflect the ideology of dominant economic interests is hardly surprising.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“With a little industry and application, anyone who is willing to extricate himself from the system of shared ideology and propaganda will readily see through the modes of distortion developed by substantial segments of the intelligentsia. Everybody is capable of doing that. If such analysis is often carried out poorly, that is because, quite commonly, social and political analysis is produced to defend special interests rather than to account for the actual events.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system. State censorship is not necessary, or even very efficient, in comparison to the ideological controls exercised by systems that are more complex and more decentralized.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“The imperialist ideology, you say, can readily tolerate a quite large number of contradictions, infractions, and criticisms—all these remain acceptable, except one: to reveal the economic motives.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“Because you cannot study the acquisition or use of language in an intelligent manner without having some idea about this language which is acquired or utilized.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“they don’t even mention the logical possibility of a third position: namely, that the United States did not have the right, either the legal or the moral right, to intervene by force in the internal affairs of Vietnam. We leave to history the task of judging the debate between the hawks and the respectable doves, but the third position, opposed to the other two, is excluded from discussion.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language

“language acquisition is not a step-by-step process of generalization, association, and abstraction, going from linguistic data to the grammar, and that the subtlety of our understanding transcends by far what is presented in experience.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language

“M.R.: In the humanities certain professors spend their time in effect teaching their Ph.D. thesis.
N.C.: Anybody who teaches at age fifty what he was teaching at age twenty-five had better find another profession. If in twenty-five years nothing has happened which proves to you that your ideas were wrong, it means that you are not in a living field, or perhaps are part of a religious sect.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language

“if people want to be confused, they will always succeed, no matter what term you use.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language

“But much more to my taste, at least, are quite different tendencies, for example, that range of opinion that extends roughly from Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick to the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker and others.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“The head of the Secret Army Organization—a provocateur in the pay of the FBI-drove past his house, and his companion fired shots into it, seriously wounding a young woman. The young man who was their target was not at home at the time. The weapon had been stolen by this FBI provocateur. According to the local branch of the ACLU, the gun was handed over the next day to the San Diego FBI Bureau, who hid it; and for six months the FBI lied to the San Diego police about the incident. This affair did not become publicly known until later. This terrorist group, directed and financed by the FBI, was finally broken up by the San Diego police, after they had tried to fire-bomb a theater in the presence of police. The FBI agent in question, who had hidden the weapon, was transferred outside the state of California so that he could not be prosecuted. The FBI provocateur also escaped prosecution, though several members of the secret terrorist organization were prosecuted.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“There are other cases of this kind. For example, in San Diego the FBI apparently financed, armed, and controlled an extreme right-wing group of former Minute Men, transforming it into something called the Secret Army Organization specializing in terrorist acts of various kinds.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system. State censorship is not necessary, or even very efficient, in comparison to the ideological controls exercised by systems that are more complex and more decentralized.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—“indoctrination,” we might say—exercised through the mass media. One of the devices used to achieve this narrowness of perspective is the reliance on professional credentials. The universities and academic disciplines have, in the past, been successful in safeguarding conformist attitudes and interpretations, so that by and large a reliance on “professional expertise” will ensure that views and analyses that depart from orthodoxy will rarely be expressed.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity of these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from the general population and to persuade them of their incapacity to organize their own affairs or to understand the social world in which they live without the tutelage of intermediaries. For that reason alone one should be careful not to link the analysis of social issues with scientific topics which, for their part, do require special training and techniques, and thus a special intellectual frame of reference, before they can be seriously investigated.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity of these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from the general population and to persuade them of their incapacity to organize their own affairs or to understand the social world in which they live without the tutelage of intermediaries.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“Hence the elaborate pretense that the press is a critical dissenting force—maybe even too critical for the health of democracy—when in fact it is almost entirely subservient to the basic principles of the ideological system:”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“There is no sensible way to invoke functional notions as explanatory concepts at the synchronic or ontogenetic level.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language

“A consistent materialist would consider it as self-evident that the mind has very important innate structures, physically realized in some manner. Why should it be otherwise?”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language

“Opposition to idealization is simply objection to rationality; it amounts to nothing more than an insistence that we shall not have meaningful intellectual work.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“the autonomy of syntax;”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“Syntactic Structures and LSLT.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“Morris Halle was already working on a generative phonology of Russian in the 1950s, and we also worked together on the generative phonology of English, at first jointly with Fred Lukoff.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“essential differences between generative grammar and structural linguistics.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

“The question is whether distinct cognitive structures can be identified, which interact in the real use of language and linguistic judgments, the grammatical system being one of these. Certainly,”
― Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume