Quotes from Noam Chomsky

The target of preventive war must have several characteristics. It must be virtually defenceless; it must be important enough to be worth the trouble; it must be possible to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.

While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.

There is a social responsibility to take care of vulnerable people. It seems that a sensible social responsibility is obligatory education, but also decent education, and that is not happening.

Right now, we happen to be in a general period of regression, not just in education. A lot of what's happening is sort of backlash to the 60s; the 60s were a democratizing period.

Organization and education, when they interact with each other, they strengthen each other, they are mutually supportive.

Education is really aimed at helping students get to the point where they can learn on their own. . .

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

If kids are studying for a test, they're not going to learn anything. We all know that from our own experience.

Right now, huge numbers of people cannot obtain even drinking water, and the situation is likely to become worse with predicted climate change and failure to take the actions that are necessary.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.

Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal

The answer to subversion of democracy is more democracy, more freedom, more justice.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.

With regard to freedom of expression there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it in favor of Stalinist/Fascist standards.

Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift.

Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it's growth in a sense.

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.

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.

We thus make a fundamental distinction between the competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations).