1,450 Quotes by Noam Chomsky

States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it’s usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they’re powerful, that’s roughly accurate.

As long as each individual is facing the television tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.

European settlers coming to a foreign land, settling there, and either committing genocide against or expelling the indigenous people. The Zionists have not invented anything new in this respect.

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or ‘hypothesis-formulating’ ability of unknown character and complexity.

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

The term ‘globalisation’ is conventionally used to refer to the specific form of investor-rights integration designed by wealth and power, for their own interests.

That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

About half the population thinks that every person in Congress, including their own representative, should be thrown out. That’s the center not holding.

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.