Noam Chomsky Quotes And Sayings

Governments Are Supposed To Lie To Their Citizens.

There's A Tremendous Gap Between Public Opinion And Public Policy.

There Were Plenty Of Other Hominids, But They Disappeared, Probably Because Humans Exterminated Them, But Nobody Knows For Sure.

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.

The Polls Show That Concern Over Inequality Among The General Public Rose Pretty Sharply After The Occupy Movement Started, Very Probably As A Consequence. And There Are Other Policy Issues That Came To The Fore, Which Are Significant.

My Family Was Mostly Unemployed Working Class.

The 14th Amendment Was Recognized Right Away To Be Problematic. The Concept Of Person Was Both Too Narrow And Too Broad, And The Courts Went To Work To Overcome Both Of Those Flaws.

Civil Disobedience Is - It's No Fun.

The Close Turkish-israeli Relations Go Back To The Late 1950s - Military Intelligence, Commercial, More Recently, Tourism And Cultural Relations.

Social Security Is Based On A Principle. It's Based On The Principle That You Care About Other People. You Care Whether The Widow Across Town, A Disabled Widow, Is Going To Be Able To Have Food To Eat.

If There Was An Observer On Mars, They Would Probably Be Amazed That We Have Survived This Long.

I Don't Think That Experience Is A Very Useful Or Convincing Attribute For A Sensible Foreign Policy. Henry Kissinger Had A Lot Of Experience.

The U.s. Is Off The Spectrum In Religious Commitment.

The Democrats Have Pretty Much Given Up On The White Working Class. That Would Require A Commitment To Economic Issues, And That's Not Their Concern.

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.

Unlike Europe, China Can't Be Intimidated. Europe Backs Down If The United States Looks At It The Wrong Way. But China, They've Been There For 3,000 Years And Are Paying No Attention To The Barbarians And Don't See Any Need To.

The United States Is Afraid Of China; It Is Not A Military Threat To Anyone And Is The Least Aggressive Of All The Major Military Powers.

Fidel Castro, Whatever People May Think Of Him, Is A Hero In Latin America, Primarily Because He Stood Up To The United States.

Historical Grammar Is A Study Of How, Say, Modern English Developed From Middle English, And How That Developed From Early And Old English, And How That Developed From Germanic, And That Developed From What's Called Proto-indo-european, A Source System That Nobody Speaks, So You Have To Try To Reconstruct It.

When General Allenby Conquered Jerusalem During World War I, He Was Hailed In The American Press As Richard The Lion-hearted, Who Had At Last Won The Crusades And Driven The Pagans Out Of The Holy Land.

If You're Teaching Today What You Were Teaching Five Years Ago, Either The Field Is Dead Or You Are.

In Societies That Profess Some Respect For Law, Suspects Are Apprehended And Brought To Fair Trial. I Stress 'Suspects.'

Under Clinton, The Defiance Of World Order Has Become So Extreme As To Be Of Concern Even To Hawkish Policy Analysts.

Well Before September 11, It Was Understood That With Modern Technology, The Rich And Powerful Will Lose Their Near Monopoly Of The Means Of Violence And Can Expect To Suffer Atrocities On Home Soil.

The Many Questions About The Bombing Of Yugoslavia By The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - Meaning Primarily The United States - Come Down To Two Fundamental Issues: 'What Are The Accepted And Applicable 'Rules Of World Order,' And How Do These Apply In The Case Of Kosovo?'

The Money In Politics Is A Cash Cow For The Media.

One Of The Most Interesting Reactions To Come Out Of 1968 Was In The First Publication Of The Trilateral Commission, Which Believed There Was A 'Crisis Of Democracy' From Too Much Participation Of The Masses.

The Iraq War Was The First Conflict In Western History In Which An Imperialist War Was Massively Protested Against Before It Had Even Been Launched.

If You Have To Control People, You Have To Have An Administrative Force That Does It. So In U.s. Industry, Even More Than Elsewhere, There's Layer After Layer Of Management - A Kind Of Economic Waste, But Useful For Control And Domination. And The Same Is True In Universities.

The American Escalation Of The War In Laos Provoked A Response By The Communist Forces, Which Now Control More Of Laos Than Ever Before.

The Great Seal Was An Early Proclamation Of 'Humanitarian Intervention,' To Use The Currently Fashionable Phrase.

There Is Still Much Debate About Whether Torture Has Been Effective In Eliciting Information - The Assumption Being, Apparently, That If It Is Effective, Then It May Be Justified.

Dr. Karel Culik Is An Outstanding Applied Mathematician, A Specialist In Algebra, Logic, Computer Sciences And Mathematical Linguistics. In 1965, He Visited The Linguistics Research Program At Mit, And We Have Worked Together On Several Projects Since.

Even The Most Cynical Can Hardly Be Surprised By The Antics Of Nixon And His Accomplices As They Are Gradually Revealed. It Matters Little, At This Point, Where The Exact Truth Lies In The Maze Of Perjury, Evasion, And Of Contempt For The Normal - Hardly Inspiring - Standards Of Political Conduct.

The Major Advances In Speed Of Communication And Ability To Interact Took Place More Than A Century Ago. The Shift From Sailing Ships To Telegraph Was Far More Radical Than That From Telephone To Email!

The 'Peace Movement' Exists Only In The Fantasies Of The Paranoid.

I Am Opposed To The Accumulation Of Executive Power Anywhere.

It Is True That Classical Libertarian Thought Is Opposed To State Intervention In Social Life, As A Consequence Of Deeper Assumptions About The Human Need For Liberty, Diversity, And Free Association.

As A Tactic, Violence Is Absurd. No One Can Compete With The Government In Violence, And The Resort To Violence, Which Will Surely Fail, Will Simply Frighten And Alienate Some Who Can Be Reached, And Will Further Encourage The Ideologists And Administrators Of Forceful Repression.

From The Late 1940s, Into And Through The '50s, There Developed A Complex Interaction Between Federal Government, State And Local Government, Real-estate Interests, Commercial Interests And Court Decisions, Which Had The Effect Of Undermining The Mass Transit System Across The Country.

I Don't See Any Possibility Of Britain And The U.s. Allowing A Sovereign Independent Iraq; That's Almost Inconceivable.

The Respected Intellectuals Are Those Who Conform And Serve Power Interests.

You Cannot Control Your Own Population By Force, But It Can Be Distracted By Consumption.

Israel Is Following Policies Which Maximise Its Security Threats... Policies Which Choose Expansion Over Security... Policies Which Lead To Their Moral Degradation, Their Isolation, Their Delegitimation, As They Call It Now, And Very Likely Ultimate Destruction. That's Not Impossible.

The Federal Reserve Has An Official Commitment To Two Different Policies. One Is To Prevent Inflation From Getting Too High. The Second Is To Maintain High Employment... The European Central Bank Has Only The First. It Has No Commitment To Keep Employment Up.

Wanton Killing Of Innocent Civilians Is Terrorism, Not A War Against Terrorism.

If Humans Were Totally Unstructured Creatures, They Would Be... A Tool Which Can Properly Be Shaped By Outside Forces.

Pakistan Will Never Be Able To Match The Indian Militarily, And The Effort To Do So Is Taking An Immense Toll On The Society.

Guantanamo Is Still Open, But It's Unlikely That Serious Torture Is Going On At Guantanamo. There Is Just Too Much Inspection.

I Don't Think A Jewish Or Christian Or Islamic State Is A Proper Concept. I Would Object To The United States As A Christian State.