Quotes About Noam Chomsky

I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

The 'peace movement' exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

Noam Chomsky, in particular, says flatly and often that he has very little concern for language in and of itself; never has, never will. His driving concern is with mental structure, and language is the most revealing tool he has for getting at the mind. Most linguists these days follow Chomsky's lead here.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

The main job of radicals in the Noam Chomsky or G. Gordon Liddy mode is to go around from one scruffy lecture hall to another reminding audiences while they may be disdained or ignored by the mainstream culture, they are actually right about everything.

Government may not redistribute private wealth or grant special privileges to any individual or group.

The government of Israel doesn't like the kinds of things I say, which puts them into the same category as every other government in the world.

But on the contrary Wikileaks is under heavy attack by the government and corporations are participating in that by closing down their websites.

In fact, a rather striking aspect of business propaganda in the United States is the demonization of government, starting after the Second World War.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

The book [Manufacturing Consent] itself is then devoted to a series of case studies, selected, we hope [with Edward Herman], to offer a fair and in fact rather severe test of those conclusions.

The desire for hope and change is easily understandable. In many ways it's even more dramatic in Europe.

Cuba has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since 1959, Cuba has been under attack from the hemispheric superpower.

What's called "liberal" in the intelectual culture means highly conformist to power, but mildly critical.

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.

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.

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

The call for debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away.

From the U.S. point of view, negotiations are, in effect, a way for Israel to continue its policies of systematically taking over whatever it wants in the West Bank, maintaining the brutal siege on Gaza, separating Gaza from the West Bank and, of course, occupying the Syrian Golan heights, all with full U.S. support.

I don't feel particularly attached to Israel - 'nationalism,' as Noam Chomsky said, 'is not my cup of tea' - but I feel no particular need to demonize it.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.