1,450 Quotes by Noam Chomsky

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them.

[James] Madison pointed out in the discussion of the constitutional debates - the constitutional convention - that democracy would be a danger. He used England of course as the model and said suppose that in England everyone had the free right to vote; the poor, the propertyless - who are the great majority - would use their voting power to take away the rights of property owners to carry out what we would call land reform.

People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the political arena. That's really threatening.

People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You're a traitor.

I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.

There are nuclear-weapons-free zones in several parts of the world already, except that they're not implemented fully, because the U.S. won't allow it.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.

We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.