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Noam Chomsky Quotes
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
Noam Chomsky

American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics.
Noam Chomsky

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
Noam Chomsky

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

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

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Noam Chomsky

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.
Noam Chomsky

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.
Noam Chomsky

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
Noam Chomsky

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

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

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

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

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.
Noam Chomsky

Personally, I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.
Noam Chomsky

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

Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.
Noam Chomsky

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

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
Noam Chomsky

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

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

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.
Noam Chomsky

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
Noam Chomsky

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

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. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.
Noam Chomsky

Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that - it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.
Noam Chomsky

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
Noam Chomsky

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
Noam Chomsky