Quotes by Noam Chomsky

“Respectable opinion would never consider an assessment of the Reagan Doctrine or earlier exercises in terms of their actual human costs, and could not comprehend that such an assessmentwhich would ...”

“Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?”

“If you give up every time you don't achieve the immediate gain you want, you're just guaranteeing that the worst is going to happen... You can't expect an easy victory after one protest march.”

“I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.”

“The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions ...”

“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.”

“Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowedeven preferred, if only for public relation purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is ...”

“No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.”

“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.”

“Peace is preferable to war. But its not an absolute value, and so we always ask, What kind of peace?”

“I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to e...”

“Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.”

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

“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,...”

“Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies ...”

“In accordance with the prevailing conceptions in the U.S., there is no infringement on democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy. In ...”

“At its root, the logic is that of the Grand Inquisitor, who bitterly assailed Christ for offering people freedom and thus condemning them to misery. The Church must correct the evil work of Christ ...”

“For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”

“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 b...”

“This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Marsthey would think the country has gone insane.”