Noam Chomsky Quotations

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. - Noam Chomsky]

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on 7 December 1928 in Philadelphia. He is a remarkable and renowned Professor Emeritus of MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). He is renowned for his contributions to modern linguistics, and has also written and lectured widely on philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and US foreign policy - he has authored over 100 books. Chomsky has become one of the most well known critics of US immoral and irresponsible activities throughout.

The following quotations are from a variety of sources. Numbered references, when found, are given at bottom of the page, and some book data too.

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The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself. - Noam Chomsky

It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is. - Noam Chomsky 1

The Irish sea is a chasm, and it just depends who's been holding the whip for 800 years and who's been under it for 800 years. - Noam Chomsky 2

Who was rounding up the Jews? Local people, often. In France they were rounding them up faster than the Nazis could handle them. The Nazis also used Jews to control Jews. - Noam Chomsky 3

Suppose you walk out in the street . . . and you see a crime being committed, you know, somebody is robbing someone else. . . . One choice is to try to stop it, maybe you call 911 or something. Another choice is to do nothing. A third choice is to pick up an assault rifle and kill 'em both, and kill a bystander at the same time. . . . And somebody says, Well, you know, why did you do that? And you say, Look, I couldn't stand by and do nothing. - Noam Chomsky 4

The incompetence of intelligence agencies is legendary. . . . In the late 1940s, the United States was kind of unclear about which side to support. That was true in Indonesia, it was true in Vietnam. You know, do you support the colonial power that's trying to reconquer it, or do you support the indigenous government and then try to take them over, that was their question. - Noam Chomsky 5

Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were concerned with their own national interests . . . anybody with a head screwed on knew that they were following national interests, but U.S. intelligence could not contemplate that possibility because it was doctrinally unacceptable. That's very similar to what was going on in the academic world, I should say. - Noam Chomsky 6

Ideological fanaticism . . . I think you find that wherever you look at intelligence activities. - Noam Chomsky 7

[On the 2003 invasion of Iraq:] Incidently, it's not American citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication. - Noam Chomsky 8

[Bush Administration neoconservatives are] the ones who broke nearly every precedent of foreign policy in the post-Cold-War world. They're the ones who chose preventative war over international law. That's what I view as destructive, not Noam Chomsky pointing it out. - Chalmers Johnson 9

[Chomsky's work was] subjected to an ongoing and intense scrutiny . . . The intellectual and moral drain was severe [But] he was able to weather these storms with his energies, morale, sense of humour and vigour and integrity of his political writings virtually intact. - Edward S. Herman 10

[The Gulf War in 1991:] Strikingly, no concern was voiced over the glaringly obvious fact that no official reason was ever offered for going to war -- no reason, that is, that could not be instantly refuted by a literate teenager. - Noam Chomsky 11

[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. . . . On December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention . . . The European Union all attended, even Britain . . . They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to the Geneva Convention. They had an official declaration, which condemned the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some grave breaches, including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term, that means serious war crimes. The United States is one of the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute the perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes. And it's worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right after the Second World War. What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting [...] and that has the usual consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media. - Noam Chomsky 12

[On war crimes] If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. - Noam Chomsky 13

[The USA acting forcefully to undermine the Accords and the UN Charter:] The wording, repeated verbatim annually in planning documents, was chosen so as to make explicit the US right to violate Article 51 (www.un.org/aboutun/charter/chapter7.htm) of the Charter, which permits the use of force only in immediate self-defense against armed attack (www.gwu.edu/~jaysmith/nicus3.html). The US proceeded to define aggression to include political warfare, or subversion, what UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson called internal aggression while defending JFK's escalation in South Vietnam. US attacks were therefore transmuted into self-defense against internal aggression. When the US bombed Libyan cities in 1986, the official justification was self defense against future attack, a ludicrous distortion of the Charter applauded by legal specialists in the national press. [Noam Chomsky 14, emphasis added

The US invasion of Panama was defended in the Security Council by appeal to Article 51, which, US Ambassador Pickering declared, provides for the use of armed force to defend a country, to defend our interests and our people, and permits the U.S. to invade Panama to prevent its territory from being used as a base for smuggling drugs into the United States -- an astonishing concept of armed attack, which passed without criticism. - Noam Chomsky 15

In June 1993, when Clinton launched a missile attack on Baghdad, killing civilians, UN Ambassador Albright appealed to Article 51, explaining that the bombing was in self-defense against armed attack -- namely, an alleged attempt to assassinate former president Bush two months earlier. The claim would have been remarkable even if the US had had credible evidence of Iraqi involvement, which, officials conceded, they did not. - Noam Chomsky 16

[Far-reaching contempt for the rule of law:] The US has always relied on the rule of force in international affairs. International law, treaties, the World Court, War Crimes Tribunals, moral judgment, etc., are regularly invoked against enemies, often quite accurately. - Noam Chomsky 17

[On Bob Dylan from about 1966-7 or so:] The only thing that was important was to live his own life happily and freely, not to mess around with other people's lives by working for civil and human rights, ending war and poverty, etc. [And he also] said something like: I have free speech, I can do what I want, so . . . If the capitalist PR machine [term used in the question] wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn't have made a better choice. - Noam Chomsky 18

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss. - Noam Chomsky

As soon as you hear the word reform you can reach for your wallet and see who's lifting it. - Noam Chomsky

Britain . . . is virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. - Noam Chomsky 19

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. - Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's truly great contribution to the struggle for human freedom is that he has taken what we have been persuaded to believe is an insane idea, a product only of individual neurosis - the idea that society is not free and quite possibly not even sane - and shown it to be empirically, demonstrably true; he has provided the vital support for the individual to be able to declare him - and herself - sane against the insanity of society, despite a million voices declaring that it is the occasional doubter who is mad. - David Edwards 20

Clinton, Kennedy, they all carried out mass murder, but they didn't think that that was what they were doing - nor does Bush. You know, they were defending justice and democracy from greater evils. - Noam Chomsky 21

Clinton's bombing of the Sudan . . . destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it). - Noam Chomsky 22

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. - Noam Chomsky

Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they're attacking, like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That's the standard way to run imperial wars. - Noam Chomsky 23

Every single memoirist . . . concocted this story that their hero, John F. Kennedy, was really planning to pull out of this unpopular war before he was killed and then Johnson changed it. If you look at the earlier memoirs, not a hint, I mean literally. - Noam Chomsky 24

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. - Noam Chomsky

For leftists like me who had long considered Chomsky as our own beacon of moral clarity, it is hard to say which development is more catastrophic: the fact that Chomsky-bashing has become a major political pastime. - Michael Berube 25

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. - Noam Chomsky

France is doing some really vicious things there [in Oceania], in fact they're just wiping out islands because they want them for nuclear tests. And when the socialist government in France is asked, Why to do this?, they say, Well look, we have to have nuclear tests. Well, if you have to have nuclear tests, why not have them in southern France? [audience laughter] Why have them in some island in the Pacific? Well, the answer to that is clear, after all they're just a bunch of little brown people or something. But you can't say that exactly, especially if you're a socialist, so something else is said. - Noam Chomsky 26

If you want to talk about distributing substances that are lethal, . . . let's be serious. Tobacco is far ahead of anything else. Alcohol is second. - Noam Chomsky abr. 27

It was declared by Congress that marijuana makes people insane. But . . . lawyers, defense lawyers, got the idea, OK, I can use this for an insanity defense. - Noam Chomsky abr. 27

[The peak of marijuana use:] That was rich kids, so you don't throw them in jail . . . It got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw people in jail for it, when it was poor people. - Noam Chomsky abr. 27

He [Chomsky] essentially said that we should put an end to terrorism, and that includes the terrorism against the US but also the terrorism committed by the US... and I agree. - Richard Stallman 29

I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. - Noam Chomsky 30

If any of you have ever looked at your FBI file, you discover that intelligence agencies in general are extremely incompetent. That's one of the reasons why there are so many intelligence failures. They just never get anything straight, for all kinds of reasons. Part of it is because of the information they get. The information they get comes from ideological fanatics, typically, who always misunderstand things in their own crazy way. If you look at an FBI file, say, about yourself, where you know what the facts are, you'll see that the information has some kind of relation to the facts, you can figure out what they're talking about, but by the time it works its way through the ideological fanaticism of the intelligence agencies, there's always weird distortion. - Noam Chomsky 31

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion. - Noam Chomsky

If you look into the history of what is called the CIA, which means the US White House, its secret wars, clandestine warfare, the trail of drug production just follows. It started in France after the Second World War when the United States was essentially trying to reinstitute the traditional social order, to rehabilitate Fascist collaborators, wipe out the Resistance and destroy the unions and so on. The first thing they did was reconstitute the Mafia, as strikebreakers or for other such useful services. And the Mafia doesn't do it for fun, so there was a tradeoff: Essentially, they allowed them to reinstitute the heroin production system, which had been destroyed by the Fascists. - Noam Chomsky 32

[The Mafia:] The US reconstituted it, first in southern Italy, and then in southern France with the Corsican Mafia. That's where the famous French Connection comes from. - Noam Chomsky 33

If you're an Iranian intelligence analyst you gonna give a worst case analysis, of course . . . with smart bombs, and deep penetration weapons... They have a terrific justification for anticipatory self defense, better than any other case I can think of. But would I approve of their bombing Israel, or carrying out terrorist acts in Washington? No. - Noam Chomsky 34

If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, You're an asshole, which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, That's idiotic, when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job. - Noam Chomsky 35

In 1945 the US was not willing to tolerate principles that would justify the Pearl Harbor attack. Today, it insists on principles that permit far more freedom to resort to violence and aggression, though of course there is a reservation, usually tacit but sometimes made explicit by the more honest commentators, like Henry Kissinger. He approves of the doctrine, but adds that it must not be universalized: the right to commit the supreme crime for which Nazi leaders were hanged must be reserved to the United States, perhaps delegated to its clients. - Noam Chomsky 36

In a staff discussion 44 years ago, President Eisenhower described the campaign of hatred against us [in the Arab world], not by the governments but by the people. His National Security Council outlined the basic reasons: the US supports corrupt and oppressive governments and is opposing political or economic progress because of its interest in controlling the oil resources of the region. - Noam Chomsky 37

In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion — a minimal respect for facts and logic — has been virtually abandoned. - Noam Chomsky 38

In the American Jewish community, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice . . . Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin. - Noam Chomsky 39

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival. - Noam Chomsky

Invasion of Iraq was likely to increase the threat of terror. It's not a high priority, so they invaded Iraq because that's much higher priority. - Noam Chomsky 40

It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. - Noam Chomsky 41

It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state. Those who choose to disregard this responsibility can justly be accused of complicity in war crimes, which is itself designated as 'a crime under international law' in the principles of the Charter of Nuremberg. - Noam Chomsky 42

It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is. - Noam Chomsky 43

I've often been struck by the extensive knowledge that people have of sports, and particularly, their self-confidence in discussing it with experts. . . . In contrast, when discussing matters of concern to human lives -- their own and others -- people tend to defer to experts. - Noam Chomsky 44

Modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. - Noam Chomsky 45

The evangelicals. . . . If all they want is gold Cadillacs and sex and so on, no big problem. - Noam Chomsky 46

Nixon at one point informs Kissinger . . . that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves . . . genocide. - Noam Chomsky 47

According to Noam Chomsky, communism was a monstrosity . . . If anything, the breakup of the communist states has brought a colossal victory for global capitalism and imperialism, with its . . . misery. - Michael Parenti 48

On humanitarian intervention in general, I guess my view is not unlike the view that was attributed to Gandhi, accurately or not, when he was supposedly asked what he thought about western civilization. He is supposed to have said that he thought it would be a good idea. Similarly, humanitarian intervention would be a good idea, in principle. - Noam Chomsky 49

One might ask why tobacco is legal and marijuana not. A possible answer is suggested by the nature of the crop. - Noam Chomsky 50

Personally I'm in favor of democracy . . . under capitalism we can't have democracy by definition. . . . A corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -- there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. . . . I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy. - Noam Chomsky 51

Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century. - Noam Chomsky

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. - Noam Chomsky

The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned. - Noam Chomsky 52

Regarding his personal character traits the most outstanding is that he is absolutely faithful . . . Professor Chomsky will never betray you. - Norman Finkelstein 53

Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. - Noam Chomsky 54

Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators. - Noam Chomsky

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions. - Noam Chomsky

States are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power [...] - Noam Chomsky 55

Suppose that we believe what we are taught. . . . destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies . . . of institutional lunacy. - Noam Chomsky 56

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries, who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill. - Noam Chomsky 57

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 58

The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. Now of course, the idealistic slogans are still needed for the media, for a lot of scholarship. - Noam Chomsky 59

The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is. - Noam Chomsky 60

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making . . . to unaccountable institutions: kings and . . . priestly castes, . . . modern corporations. [Noam Chomsky 61

The Ottoman Empire . . . The rulers in Turkey were fortunately so corrupt that they left people alone pretty much -- were mostly interested in robbing them -- and they left them alone to run their own affairs . . . with a lot of local self determination. - Noam Chomsky 62

The people who live on the land - Israelis and Palestinians - have a right to live in security and peace. - Noam Chomsky 63

The point of public relations slogans like Support Our Troops is that they don't mean anything [...] that's the whole point of good propaganda. . . . Nobody knows what it means, . . . It diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? . . . you're not allowed to talk about. - Noam Chomsky 64

The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided . . . democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival. - Noam Chomsky 65

The September 11 [2001] attacks were major atrocities. . . . This was a horrendous crime . . . The primary victims . . . were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians . . . It is also likely to lead to harsh security controls, with many possible ramifications for undermining civil liberties and internal freedom. - Noam Chomsky 66

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. - Noam Chomsky 67

The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy. - Noam Chomsky 68

The US and Israel have demanded further that Palestinians not only recognize Israel's rights as a state in the international system, but that they also recognize Israel's abstract right to exist, a concept that has no place in international law or diplomacy, and a right claimed by no one. In effect, the US and Israel are demanding that Palestinians . . . formally accept the legitimacy of their expulsion from their own land. They cannot be expected to accept that, just as Mexico does not grant the US the right to exist on half of Mexico's territory, gained by conquest. - Noam Chomsky 69

The US intervened in the Philippines to uplift and christianize the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same thing happened with other countries. - Noam Chomsky 70

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. - Noam Chomsky

There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known, it's called sugar. . . . The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans. - Noam Chomsky 71

Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. - Noam Chomsky 72

He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century. - Robert Barsky 73

What can one say about a country where a museum of science in a great city can feature an exhibit in which people fire machine guns from a helicopter at Vietnamese huts, with a light flashing when a hit is scored? . . . You have to weep for this country. - Noam Chomsky 74

Women taking care of children . . . it makes sense to pay them for that work . . . they should be paid for it, but that requires tax payments. And the same is true about protection of the environment. - Noam Chomsky 75

The Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible - not only did He order (www.bible.org/netbible/1sa15.htm) His chosen people to carry out literal genocide - I mean, wipe out every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on, because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert - not only did He do things like that, but, after all, the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That's the story of Noah. I mean, that's beyond genocide - you don't know how to describe this creature. Somebody offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive - that's supposed to be gentle and wonderful. - Noam Chomsky 76]