1,450 Quotes by Noam Chomsky

Rand Paul...said national health insurance is slavery. He said, I'm a physician, and if there's national health insurance, the government is forcing me to take care of somebody who is ill. Why should I be a slave to the state? Here we're getting capitalist pathology in its most extreme, lunatic form. It is the opposite of solidarity, mutual support, mutual help.

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.

The role of intellectuals and radical activists, then, must be to assess and evaluate, to attempt to persuade, to organize, but not to seize power and rule

There is no sensible way to invoke functional notions as explanatory concepts at the synchronic or ontogenetic level.

These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.

See, one of the serious illusions we live under in the United States, which is a major part of the whole system of indoctrination, is the idea that the government is the power―and the government's not the power, the government is one segment of power. Real power is in the hands of the people who own the society; the state-managers are usually just servants.

I am not too happy with terms like “the left”, to be honest. And I don’t use it much….if by “the left” you mean people who are committed to peace and justice and freedom and so on, there can’t be elements of the left opposed to workers’ movement, at least under that definition.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to sell themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract" - but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve", that's not a choice - it's infact what was commonly referred to as 'wage slavery' in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to run tonsils in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract" - but that's a joke. If you are choice is, "do what I tell you are starve", that's not a choice - it's infact what was commonly referred to as 'wage slavery" in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineenth centuries.