'Tough love' is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.
--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
Businesses try to maximize profit, power, market share and control over the state. Sometimes what they do helps other people, but that's just by chance.
--Noam Chomsky
Education is a condition of imposed ignorance!
--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
How it is we have so much information, but know so little?
--Noam Chomsky
I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.
--Noam Chomsky
I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled.
--Noam Chomsky
I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.
--Noam Chomsky
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
--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
If you think the wrong thoughts, you're not in the system.
--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
See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
--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
The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.
--Noam Chomsky
The Internet is an elite organization; most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.
--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 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.
--Noam Chomsky
The press is owned by wealthy men who only want certain things to reach the public.
--Noam Chomsky
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum- even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
--Noam Chomsky
There's a good reason why nobody studies history. It just teaches you too much.
--Noam Chomsky
To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.
--Noam Chomsky
Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.
--Noam Chomsky
We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
--Noam Chomsky
You don't get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.
--Noam Chomsky
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
--Noam Chomsky
Found 28 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).