The Essential Chomsky Quotes

“The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“There may be no end to such discoveries, if civilization survives. A truly decent and honest person will always seek to discover forms of oppression, hierarchy, domination, and authority that infringe fundamental human rights. As some are overcome, others will be revealed that previously were not part of our conscious awareness. We thus come to a better understanding of who and what we are in our inner nature, and who and what we should be in our actual lives. This”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“To speak truth to power is not a particularly honorable vocation.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“teaching should not be compared to filling a bottle with water but rather to helping a flower to grow in its own way.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“Human rights are rooted in human nature, and we violate fundamental human rights when people are forced to be slaves, wage slaves, servants of external power, subjected to systems of authority and domination, manipulated and controlled "for their own good.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology, and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us. The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of peoples,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“It is easy to be carried away by the sheer horror of what the daily press reveals and to lose sight of the fact that this is merely the brutal exterior of a deeper crime, of commitment to a social order that guarantees endless suffering and humiliation and denial of elementary human rights,”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“In a free society, we do not imprison those who violate profound cultural taboos or burn them at the stake. But they must be identified as dangerous radicals, not fit to be counted among the priesthood. The reaction is appropriate. To raise the dread question is to open the possibility that the institutions responsible “for the indoctrination of the young” and the other propaganda institutions may be infected by the most dangerous of plagues: insight and understanding. Awareness of the facts might threaten the social order, protected by a carefully spun web of pluralist mysticism, faith in the benevolence of our pure-hearted leadership, and general superstitious belief. An”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to—rather than alleviate—material and cultural deficit. If”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“What remains of democracy is to be construed as the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders have long explained the need to impose on the population a “philosophy of futility” and “lack of purpose in life,” to “concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption.” Deluged by such propaganda from infancy, people may then accept their meaningless and subordinate lives and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—no feeling, for example, that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“As a child, Chomsky was influenced by the radical Jewish intellectual culture in New York City, where he regularly visited newsstands and bookstores with anarchist literature. According to Chomsky, this was a “working class culture with working class values, solidarity, socialist values.”4”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“Charles Maechling, who led counterinsurgency and internal-defense planning for Presidents Johnson and Kennedy from 1961–66 and is now an associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described U.S. trainees in Latin America as “indistinguishable from the war criminals hanged at Nuremberg after World War II,”* adding that “for the United States, which led the crusade against the Nazi evil, to support the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads is an outrage.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“Recall Bernard Fall’s estimate that by April 1965, before the first North Vietnamese battalion was detected in the South, more than 160,000 “Viet Cong” had fallen “under the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and, finally, vomiting gases.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“Apologists for state violence understand very well that the general public has no real stake in imperial conquest and domination. The public costs of empire may run high, whatever the gains to dominant social and economic groups. Therefore the public must be aroused by jingoist appeals, or at least kept disciplined and submissive, if American force is to be readily available for global management.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“From his early essays in the liberal intellectual journal the New York Review of Books to his most recent books Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and Interventions, Noam Chomsky has produced a singular body of political criticism.1 American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), his first published collection of political writing (dedicated “To the brave young men who refuse to serve in a criminal war”), contains essays that still stand out for their insight and biting wit nearly four decades later.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“In the final analysis there can be no solid foundation for peace in the world so long as the super-Powers insist on taking unilateral military action whenever they claim to see a threat to their security”91—or, we may add, a threat to the perceived self-interest of dominant social groups.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“In a book published in 1963, Richard Tregaskis reported interviews with American helicopter pilots who describe how the “wild men” of the 362nd Squadron used to shoot civilians for sport in “solid VC areas.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“It is easy for an American intellectual to deliver homilies on the virtues of freedom and liberty, but if he is really concerned about, say, Chinese totalitarianism or the burdens imposed on the Chinese peasantry in forced industrialization, then he should face a task that is infinitely more significant and challenging—the task of creating, in the United States, the intellectual and moral climate, as well as the social and economic conditions, that would permit this country to participate in modernization and development in a way commensurate with its material wealth and technical capacity.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“a system of governance that merely grants the general public the opportunity to ratify decisions taken by the elite groups that dominate the private society and the state, hardly merits the term “democracy.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“by considering what has happened in East Timor since 1975, we can learn some important things about ourselves, our society, and our institutions. If we do not like what we find when we look at the facts—and few will fail to be appalled if they take an honest look—we can work to bring about changes in the practices and structure of institutions that cause terrible suffering and slaughter. To the extent that we see ourselves as citizens in a democratic community, we have a responsibility to devote our energies to these ends. The recent history of Timor provides a revealing insight into the policies of the U.S. government,”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky

“If a concept or principle finds its place in an explanatory theory, it cannot be excluded on methodological grounds.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Essential Chomsky