If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.
— Noam Chomsky
If you don't like what someone has to say, argue with them.
I don't have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.
Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.
I don't like the intellectual label.
Governments don't control people like they used to.
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.
To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.
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.
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
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.
We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does, he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees.
States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.
I don't want followers.
Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.
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.
I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.
How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.
Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
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.
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.
Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
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.
The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!
It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.
Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.
It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.
If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.
Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.
In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.
Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.
In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
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.
Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.
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.
I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
I like Gramsci. He's an important person.
