Quotes from Noam Chomsky

The meaning of life is something we answer with our own activities, there's no general answer--we determine what the meaning of it is. Meaning in the sense of significance, not in the sense of 'chair means this', but the significance of your life, is something you create

Look, if you have a political movement that's strong enough that the power structure has to accommodate it, it'll get accommodated in some fashion-as in the case of union organizing rights here, the Wagner Act. But when that movement stops being active and challenging, those rights just aren't going to matter very much anymore.

In accord with the reigning single standard, the major terrorist atrocities—or worse, aggression—are excluded from the canon of international terrorism.

Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel's huge US-supplied bulldozers demolished his home with the family inside. Thanks to prevailing moral standards, such acts are also excluded from the canon of terrorism (or worse, war crimes), by virtue of wrong agency.3

The business classes, which largely run the country, are highly class conscious. It is not a distortion to describe them as vulgar Marxists, with values and commitments reversed.

If you want to traumatize people, treason trials are an extreme way—if there are spies running around in our midst, then we're really in trouble, we'd better just listen to the government and stop thinking.

The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you can't say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you're expected to give evidence, and that you can't do between two commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can't talk.

He did not foresee that in a predatory capitalist economy, state intervention would be an absolute necessity to preserve human existence and to prevent the destruction of the physical environment—I speak optimistically.

Part of the doctrinal system in the United States is the pretense that we're all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that's radically false.

Like, we can have big discussions about what society ought to look like in the future, which is fine, but that doesn't affect what happens to people in their lives right now, except extremely indirectly. What happens to people in their daily lives usually depends on small, difficult, tactical assessments about where to put your time and energy

It is rather striking to observe that the policies that the rich and powerful adopt for themselves are the precise opposite of those they dictate to the weak and poor.

The ritual denunciation of the so-called 'socialist' states is replete with distortions and often outright lies.

no form of politics is worth our time until it helps struggling people get what they need, sustainably and reliably. All the better if you can do so without patriarchy and fundamentalism.

At Harvard they teach people how to rule the world and at MIT they teach them how to make the world work. This is for the elite schools. For the rest, turn them into servants.

Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness

La libertad, cuando no hay oportunidades, es un regalo envenenado; y negarse a proporcionar estas oportunidades es un acto criminal.

About half the population thinks that every person in Congress, including their own representative, should be thrown out. That's the center not holding.

People are called intellectuals because they're privileged. It's not because they're smart or they know a lot. There are plenty of people who know more and are smarter but aren't intellectuals because they don't have the privilege. The people called intellectuals are privileged. They have resources and opportunities, and enough freedom has been won so that they state does not have an unrestrained capacity to repress

it is more gratifying to bask in praise for courageously protesting the abuses of official enemies: a fine activity, but not the priority of a value-oriented intellectual who takes the responsibilities of that stance seriously.

US relations with the World Court and other international institutions have undergone a similar evolution, to which we return.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system. State censorship is not necessary, or even very efficient, in comparison to the ideological controls exercised by systems that are more complex and more decentralized.

The goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves being master over production. These

The workers who built the settlements and produced the export crops may now enjoy their freedom in the world's largest prison.58

The "political revolution" that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. What that means is the spectrum has shifted so far to the right that what the population wants, and what was once mainstream, now looks radical and extremist.