Avram Noam Chomsky (b.1928) is an American theoretical linguist who transformed linguistics by regarding language as a distinctively human, biologically based cognitive capacity. Noted for expounding the theory of generative grammar, he also posited that linguistic behavior is inborn, not learned and that all languages share the same underlying grammatical base.
Chomsky also gained a worldwide following as a dissident for his assessments of the power of economic elites on American domestic and foreign policy. He was a prominent activist against American involvement in the Vietnam War and the Gulf War.
Chomsky’s notable works include Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Noam Chomsky
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.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Protest
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Intellectuals, Intelligence
Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can’t tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Behavior, Manners
I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
—Noam Chomsky
The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Prejudice
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.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: America
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
Topics: Sports
We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Heroism, Ideas, Heroes
The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert, and so on.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Prophecy
Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Terrorism
Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Terrorism
The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Public
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
Topics: Propaganda
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
Topics: Freedom
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Government
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Language
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Growth
The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Humanity, Human Nature
Personally, I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can’t have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level—there’s little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Government
If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Freedom
If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
—Noam Chomsky
We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Society
The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making rom the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, riestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern orporations.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Justice
Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Capitalism
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
—Noam Chomsky
The consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a “vanguard” party, or a State bureaucracy.
—Noam Chomsky
Topics: Discipline
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