Noam Chomsky Quotes

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.

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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.

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The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.

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I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.

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The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.

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

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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.

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Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

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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.

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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.

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Thinking is a human feature. Will AI someday really think? That's like asking if submarines swim. If you call it swimming then robots will think, yes.

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For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

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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.

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This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars - they would think the country has gone insane.

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People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.

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The European reaction to Obama is a European delusion.

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المثقف من حمل الحقيقة في وجه القوة ('cultured from carrying the truth in the face of power')

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No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herseif as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.

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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.

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Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?

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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

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

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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.

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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.

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To speak truth to power is not a particularly honorable vocation.

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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.

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