1,450 Quotes by Noam Chomsky

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.

The free market is 'socialism' for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit - markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich.

Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can't deal with them... But it's a complicated matter: Science studies what's at the edge of understanding, and what's at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.

Women didn't have rights. Under British common law, women were property.

The government argues that First Amendment rights are outweighed by the need to prosecute those who transmit classified information and documents.

Iran has been calling for it for years, and the Arab countries support it. Everyone except the United States and Israel support it. The U.S. won't allow it because it means inspecting Israel's nuclear weapons. The U.S. has continued to block it, and in fact blocked it again just a couple of days ago; it just wasn't widely reported. Iran's nuclear program, as U.S. intelligence points out, is deterrent, and the bottom line is that the U.S. and Israel don't want Iran to have a deterrent.

We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.

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.

If you're in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.