Quotes By Noam Chomsky

In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

I don't want followers.

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.

As a research tool, the internet is invaluable.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

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

State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.

My proposal happens to be very mainstream.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.

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.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.

When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.

In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.

The 'anti-globalisation movement' is the most significant proponent of globalisation - but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

I don't like the intellectual label.

Anti-Americanism is a pure totalitarian concept. The very notion is idiotic.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

As a Zionist youth leader in the 1940s, I was among those who called for a binational state in Mandatory Palestine. When a Jewish state was declared, I felt that it should have the rights of other states - no more, no less.

If you don't like what someone has to say, argue with them.