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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Noam Chomsky Quotes

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

– Noam Chomsky

In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it.

– Noam Chomsky

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

Undoubtedly, the U.S. harbors leading international terrorists, people described by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department as leading terrorists, like Orlando Bosch, now Posada Carriles, not to speak of those who actually implement state terrorism.

– Noam Chomsky

Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.

– Noam Chomsky

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.

– Noam Chomsky

U.S. Government propaganda tries to give the impression that aerial bombardment achieves near-surgical accuracy, so that military targets can be destroyed with minimal effect on civilians. Technical documents give a different picture.

– Noam Chomsky

When a politician uses the word ‘folks,’ we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

– Noam Chomsky

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

– Noam Chomsky

My proposal happens to be very mainstream.

– Noam Chomsky

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

– Noam Chomsky

In September 1993, President Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn – the climax of a ‘day of awe,’ as the press described it.

– Noam Chomsky

Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.

– Noam Chomsky

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

– Noam Chomsky

The internet could be a very positive step towards education, organisation and participation in a meaningful society.

– Noam Chomsky

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

– Noam Chomsky

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

– Noam Chomsky

Right after 9-11, as far as I know, one newspaper in the United States had the integrity to investigate opinion in the Muslim world: the ‘Wall Street Journal.’

– Noam Chomsky

States are not moral agents.

– Noam Chomsky

With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.

– Noam Chomsky

I don’t join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn’t have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in Heaven – that’s none of my business, ultimately. I won’t lecture her on the philosophy of science.

– Noam Chomsky

What’s important in Libya is, first of all, it has a good deal of oil. A lot of the country is unexplored; there may be a lot more. And it’s very high-quality oil, so very valuable.

– Noam Chomsky

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production, and the wage-slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.

– Noam Chomsky

It is easy to dismiss the world as ‘irrelevant,’ or consumed by ‘paranoid anti-Americanism,’ but perhaps not wise.

– Noam Chomsky

If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself.

– Noam Chomsky

By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.

– Noam Chomsky

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact.

– Noam Chomsky

Obama’s policies have been approximately the same as Bush’s, though there have been some slight differences, but that’s not a great surprise. The Democrats supported Bush’s policies.

– Noam Chomsky

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

– Noam Chomsky

Chinese military spending is carefully monitored by the United States.

– Noam Chomsky

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