Quotes by Noam Chomsky

• The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
• 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.
• In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
• If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
• If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
• The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.
• Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
• Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.
• Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.
• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
• As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
• Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
• All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
• Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
• The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
• We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
• Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.
• Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
• The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media.
• Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
• The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.
• States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
• To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.