Noam Chomsky Quotes

Noam Chomsky: “Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.”

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

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Noam Chomsky: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”

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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.”

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

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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.”

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Noam Chomsky: “If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that's something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can't live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.”

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

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Noam Chomsky: “There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change -- and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.”

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Noam Chomsky: “For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we sere as willing or unwitting instruments.”

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Noam Chomsky: “If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all.”

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Noam Chomsky: “The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.”

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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.”

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Noam Chomsky: “How do I define God? I don't. Divinities have been understood in various ways in the cultural traditions that we know. Take, say, the core of the established religions today: the Bible. It is basically polytheistic, with the warrior God demanding of his chosen people that they not worship the other Gods and destroy those who do -- in an extremely brutal way, in fact. It would be hard to find a more genocidal text in the literary canon, or a more violent and destructive character than the God who was to be worshipped. So that's one definition.

In the Prophets, one finds (sometimes) a different conception, much more humane. That's why the Prophets (the 'dissident intellectuals' of their day) were persecuted, imprisoned, driven into the desert, etc. -- other reasons included their geopolitical analysis, unwelcome to power. The intellectuals who were honored and privileged were those who centuries later were called 'false prophets.' More or less a cultural universal. There were different conceptions of divinity associated with these tendencies, and Greek and Zoroastrian influences are probable causes for later monotheistic tendencies (how one evaluates these are a different matter).

Looking beyond, we find other conceptions, of many kinds. But I have nothing to propose. People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don't. That's why you haven't found my 'thoughts on this [for you] criticaI question.' I have none, because I see no need for them (apart from the -- often extremely interesting and revealing -- inquiry into human culture an history).”

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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.”

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