Noam Chomsky Quotes

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

"In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population."

"You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption."

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

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

"There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do."

"Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them."

"Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism."

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

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

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

"The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society."

"The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays."

"There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy."

"There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders."

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

"Perhaps the most striking assault on the foundations of traditional liberties is a little-known case brought to the Supreme Court by the Obama administration, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project."

"Nationalism has a way of oppressing others."

"Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below."

"If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa."

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

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

"Today, we have private airline companies, but if you take a look at a Boeing plane next time you travel, you'll see that you are basically taking a ride on a modified bomber."

"If you could take a subway from the suburbs in Boston, where I live, to downtown in 10 minutes, that improves your life over sitting in a traffic jam. People should see that."

"Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment."

"The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism - mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn't deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets."

"If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works."

"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."

"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."

"It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open."