Quotes from Noam Chomsky

if people want to be confused, they will always succeed, no matter what term you use.

M.R.: In the humanities certain professors spend their time in effect teaching their Ph.D. thesis. N.C.: Anybody who teaches at age fifty what he was teaching at age twenty-five had better find another profession. If in twenty-five years nothing has happened which proves to you that your ideas were wrong, it means that you are not in a living field, or perhaps are part of a religious sect.

at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to—rather than alleviate—material and cultural deficit. If

to accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers' rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder.

Almost all the Republicans are climate deniers. They have already begun to cut funding for measures that might mitigate environmental catastrophe. Worse, some are true believers; take for example the new head of a subcommittee on the environment who explained that global warming cannot be a problem because God promised Noah that there will not be another flood.30

In the moral calculus of currently prevailing state capitalism, profits and bonuses in the next quarter greatly outweigh concern for the welfare of one's grandchildren, and since these are institutional maladies, they will not be easy to overcome. While much remains uncertain, we can assure ourselves, with fair confidence, that future generations will not forgive us our silence and apathy.

It takes a phrase to produce a lie and ten minutes to decode it.

History doesn't go in a straight line... Over time there's a kind of a general trajectory towards a more just society, with regressions and reversals of course.

It is noteworthy that the pro-Israeli lobby was established, according to the declared aims of its founder, to eliminate pro-Arab influence in the State Department. This particular mission was accomplished, it seems, not so much by the lobby's effort as by the successful endeavors of the Christian Zionists.

where there is no question of justice, just the question of who's going to win a struggle to the death, then I think the proper human reaction is: call it off, don't win either way, try to stop it

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

Even David Ben-Gurion wrote during the 1936–39 Arab uprising against the British that Arabs have legitimate anger against the Zionists. "The country is theirs because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down.

the Communists undertook a spirited defence of the small and medium proprietor and tenant farmer against the collectivizing drive of the rural wage-workers, against the policy of the labour unions prohibiting the farmer from holding more land than he could cultivate with his own hands, and against the practices of revolutionary committees, which requisitioned harvests, interfered with private trade, and collected rents from tenant farmers.

there's no law of nature which says that control over capital has to be in a few hands-that's like saying political power has to be in a few hands. Why? There wasn't a law that said that the king and nobles had to run everything, and there isn't a law that says that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically, they can be changed historically.

essential differences between generative grammar and structural linguistics.

I don't have anything against bulldozers; I think they're great. It's a lot better than digging with a shovel.

The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth, and facilitated justice" (2017).

No, there is no real Left now. If you are just counting heads, there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they are atomized, committed to different special interests—gay rights, environmental rights, this, that. They don't coalesce into a movement that can really do things.

I mean, it's nice to have the laws, but it's nice partly because it makes it easier to struggle for your rights-it's not that the laws give you the rights. Laws can be on the books and mean absolutely nothing

Then he quotes Hannah Arendt from her book The Origins of Totalitarianism: "The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies with factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed" (quoted in Hedges 2017).

stupid orders for years and years—that's the way I did it, for example. Like, you're told by some stupid teacher, "Do this," which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you

There is imperial terror and aggression, there is exploitation, there is racism, lots of things like that. But there is also a real concern, coexisting with it, for individual rights of a sort which, for example, are embodied in the Bill of Rights, which is by no means simply an expression of class oppression. It is also an expression of the necessity to defend the individual against state power.

Morris Halle was already working on a generative phonology of Russian in the 1950s, and we also worked together on the generative phonology of English, at first jointly with Fred Lukoff.

Control of Latin America was the earliest goal of US foreign policy and remains a central one partly for resources and markets but also for broader ideological reasons. If the United States could not control Latin America it could not expect to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world