64 Respected Noam Chomsky Quotes For Visionary Thinking

There’s no doubt he’s not afraid to go against mainstream thought, with visionary thinking the basis for his spoken intellect. Groundbreaking theories on linguistic psychology and politics have made Noam Chomsky one of the most quoted scholars in history who will forever despise the media.

Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Pennsylvania, 1928 and is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic and political activist. From an early age, he was exposed to socialism and far-left politics through relatives. His uncle would frequent the New York City Newspaper stand to debate current affairs. Chomsky visited him in the city often, and went to left-wing and anarchist bookstores while he was there.

After earning a doctorate in 1955, he began teaching at MIT, emerging as a significant figure in linguistics in 1957. Chomsky’s landmark work, Syntactic Structures, played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959, he was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. Chomsky created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy and the minimalist program. He also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviourism.

Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals. He was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list as an association of the New Left. He continued to generate controversy through his involvement in the linguistic wars and defence of unconditional freedom of speech.

With major influence across a variety of academic fields. Chomsky has become a leading voice in sparking the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of the language and the mind. He will forever remain an iconic critic of US foreign policy, neoliberalism and contemporary state capitalism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mainstream news media.

Chomsky will continue to voice his thoughts, with a high level of influence forever remaining in passionate fields he will always have an opinion on…undoubtedly voiced despite who who wants to hear it.

1. How it is we have so much information, but know so little?

Noam Chomsky

2. If you want to achieve something, you build the basis for it.

Noam Chomsky

3. Debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous, far larger than credit card debt. It’s a trap for the rest of your life because the laws are designed so that you can’t get out of it. If a business, say, gets in too much debt, it can declare bankruptcy, but individuals can almost never be relieved of student debt through bankruptcy.

Noam Chomsky

4. It’s only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it’s not terrorism.

Noam Chomsky

5. You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

Noam Chomsky

6. It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.

Noam Chomsky

7. Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

Noam Chomsky

8. Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information. You expect to see delusion and imagery.

Noam Chomsky

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

Noam Chomsky

10. If it’s wrong when they do it, it’s wrong when we do it.

Noam Chomsky

11. Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states

Noam Chomsky

12. Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.

Noam Chomsky

13. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.

Noam Chomsky

14. Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

Noam Chomsky

15. It is quite possible–overwhelmingly probable, one might guess–that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.

Noam Chomsky

16. Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.

Noam Chomsky

17. Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

Noam Chomsky

18. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.

Noam Chomsky

19. Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.

Noam Chomsky

20. In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.

Noam Chomsky

21. The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on — because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.

Noam Chomsky

22. Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

Noam Chomsky

23. For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

Noam Chomsky

24. I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.

Noam Chomsky

25. Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.

Noam Chomsky

26. Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.

Noam Chomsky

27. The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.

Noam Chomsky

28. The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.

Noam Chomsky

29. Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

Noam Chomsky

30. Terrorists regard themselves as a vanguard. They’re trying to mobilize others to their cause. I mean, every specialist on terrorism knows that.

Noam Chomsky

31. International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn’t pay his protection money. You have to have obedience; otherwise, the idea can spread that you don’t have to listen to the orders, and it can spread to important places.

Noam Chomsky

32. It’s not radical Islam that worries the US — it’s independence.

Noam Chomsky

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

Noam Chomsky

34. Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children[‘s] … normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don’t understand.

Noam Chomsky

35. The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren’t being paid for it. It’s work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.

Noam Chomsky

36. The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

Noam Chomsky

37. The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It’s very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can’t fight the world alone.

Noam Chomsky

38. Violence can succeed, as Americans know well from the conquest of the national territory. But at terrible cost. It can also provoke violence in response, and often does.

Noam Chomsky

39. Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that’s so deep in history that there’s no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

Noam Chomsky

40. I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‘Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?

Noam Chomsky

41. Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?

Noam Chomsky

42. That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.

Noam Chomsky

43. Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

Noam Chomsky

44. In the US, there is basically one party – the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to these policies. As is most of the population.

Noam Chomsky

45. he smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Noam Chomsky

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

Noam Chomsky

47. Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

Noam Chomsky

48. You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

Noam Chomsky

49. Don’t be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.

Noam Chomsky

50. If you look at history, even recent history, you see that there is indeed progress. . . . Over time, the cycle is clearly, generally upwards. And it doesn’t happen by laws of nature. And it doesn’t happen by social laws. . . . It happens as a result of hard work by dedicated people who are willing to look at problems honestly, to look at them without illusions, and to go to work chipping away at them, with no guarantee of success — in fact, with a need for a rather high tolerance for failure along the way, and plenty of disappointments.

Noam Chomsky

51. It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.

Noam Chomsky

52. All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

Noam Chomsky

53. It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

Noam Chomsky

54. It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

Noam Chomsky

55. If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I’m a professor at MIT, that’s nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

Noam Chomsky

56. That’s the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody’s going to be against, and everybody’s going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn’t mean anything.

Noam Chomsky

57. If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.

Noam Chomsky

58. Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

Noam Chomsky

59. Concentration of executive power, unless it’s very temporary and for specific circumstances, let’s say fighting world war two, it’s an assault on democracy.

Noam Chomsky

60. The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.

Noam Chomsky

61. State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.

Noam Chomsky

62. 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.

Noam Chomsky

63. There are few genuine conservatives within the U.S. political system, and it is a sign of the intellectual corruption of the age that the honorable term ‘conservatism’ can be appropriated to disguise the advocacy of a powerful, lawless, aggressive and violent state, a welfare state for the rich dedicated to a lunatic form of Keynesian economic intervention that enhances state and private power while mortgaging the country’s future.

Noam Chomsky

64. We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.

Noam Chomsky