The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself. - Noam Chomsky
Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry? - Noam Chomsky
Small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences. [Source: Al Jazeera 'Upfront' interview] - Noam Chomsky
Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it. - Noam Chomsky
People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction. - Noam Chomsky
...the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. - Noam Chomsky
The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren't being paid for it. It's work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns. - Noam Chomsky
It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence - Noam Chomsky
الناس ثنائيون من حيث الجوهر، عقلانيون فيما يتعلق بالعالم الطبيعي، لكنهم يتحولون إلى لا عقلانيين تماماً وإلى باطنيين غامضين حين يستديرون نحو طبيعتهم الخاصة - نعوم تشومسكي، Noam Chomsky
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
The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history. - Noam Chomsky
Advertising is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled. - Noam Chomsky
In its foreign policies, the United States does not punish atrocities, only disobedience. - Noam Chomsky
According to the standards of the Nuremburg Trials, every American president since World War II could be convicted as a war criminal and hung. - Noam Chomsky
The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined. - 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
It is probable that the most inhuman monsters, even the Himmlers and the Mengeles, convince themselves that they are engaged in noble and courageous acts. - Noam Chomsky
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so. - Noam Chomsky
See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence. - Noam Chomsky
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions. - Noam Chomsky
I was never aware of any other option but to question everything. - Noam Chomsky
By now, they rank people by income level or wages roughly the same: The bottom seventy per cent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show. - Noam Chomsky
Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, What kind of peace? - Noam Chomsky
That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. - Noam Chomsky
The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient. - Noam Chomsky
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. - Noam Chomsky
When Loughner himself speaks and we find out his real influences are Spiderman, 'Gnome Chomsky,' Taylor Swift, and Dr. Bronner, then what? - Walter Kirn
This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars—they would think the country has gone insane. - Noam Chomsky
المثقف من حمل الحقيقة في وجه القوة ('cultured from carrying the truth in the face of power') - Noam Chomsky
If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong. - Noam Chomsky
Willingness to be puzzled is a valuable trait to cultivate, from childhood to advanced inquiry. - 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
That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. - Noam Chomsky
Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice. - Noam Chomsky
It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology - Noam Chomsky
Now, where are [Mexican illegal immigrants] fleeing from? Mostly from Central America, where they’re fleeing from the results of our policies. - Noam Chomsky
If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it. - Noam Chomsky
It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism. - Noam Chomsky
Experience becomes possible because of language. - Noam Chomsky
The freedom of speech is worthless without the freedom of offensive speech. Goebbels and Himmler were for freedom of speech that was inoffensive to the state. - Noam Chomsky
The European reaction to Obama is a European delusion. - Noam Chomsky
Thinking is a human feature. Will AI someday really think? That's like asking if submarines swim. If you call it swimming then robots will think, yes. - Noam Chomsky
Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile. - 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
...if you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed not to believe in, and I've never seen an explanation. - Noam Chomsky