Quotes from Noam Chomsky

There is a big difference between tweeting to your friend about something that is happening and having a real personal relationship with people.

The two countries [Pakistan and India] have already come close to nuclear confrontation twice and this could get worse. So dealing with the relationship with India is extremely important.

It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.

Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes... to an extent, that's true elsewhere, including the United States, but it's been pretty extreme in Greece.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

Unlike Iran, Israel refuses to allow inspections at all, refuses to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has hundreds of nuclear weapons, has advanced delivery systems.

Remember, weapons of mass destruction don't mean missiles.

As far as U.S. intelligence knows, Iran is developing nuclear capacities, but they don't know if they are trying to develop nuclear weapons or not. Chances are they're developing what's called 'nuclear capability,' which many states have. That is the ability to have nuclear weapons if they decide to do it. That's not a crime.

It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

If you're working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.

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

The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics - greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

Civil disobedience's main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.

As a tactic, violence is absurd. No one can compete with the Government in violence, and the resort to violence, which will surely fail, will simply frighten and alienate some who can be reached, and will further encourage the ideologists and administrators of forceful repression.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.

In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.

In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

One of the greatest dangers is secular religion - state worship.

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

Universities are less constrained by authority and rigid doctrine in the United States than in most other societies, to my knowledge.