Noam Chomsky Quotes

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.

If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.

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.

Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you’re trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

The general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.

We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.

He who controls the media controls the minds of the public.

Democratic societies can’t force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

The so-called Iran threat could be dealt with by establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East. Everyone is in favor of that, including Iran. The U.S. blocks it because they would have to open up Israeli nuclear weapons to inspection.

A democracy barely functions under the neoliberal system.