13 Quotes from American historian and political activist Noam Chomsky

   

 1.“I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. ‘Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won’t? How do I know there’s anything there except what I’m conscious of?” - Noam Chomsky

2. “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.” - Noam Chomsky

3. “Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.”- Noam Chomsky

4. “Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don’t just succumb.” - Noam Chomsky

5. “The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on — because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.”- Noam Chomsky

6. “If you look at history, even recent history, you see that there is indeed progress. . . . Over time, the cycle is clearly, generally upwards. And it doesn’t happen by laws of nature. And it doesn’t happen by social laws. . . . It happens as a result of hard work by dedicated people who are willing to look at problems honestly, to look at them without illusions, and to go to work chipping away at them, with no guarantee of success — in fact, with a need for a rather high tolerance for failure along the way, and plenty of disappointments.”- Noam Chomsky

7. “The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.”- Noam Chomsky

8. “It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.”- Noam Chomsky

9. “It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.”- Noam Chomsky

10. “Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it”. - Noam Chomsky

11. “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.”- Noam Chomsky

12. “There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.”- Noam Chomsky

13. “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state”- Noam Chomsky