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

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
Noam Chomsky

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
Noam Chomsky

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.
Noam Chomsky

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Noam Chomsky

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.
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.
Noam Chomsky

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

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.
Noam Chomsky

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
Noam Chomsky


If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
Noam Chomsky

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
Noam Chomsky

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky

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.
Noam Chomsky

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

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Noam Chomsky

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.
Noam Chomsky

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.
Noam Chomsky

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
Noam Chomsky

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
Noam Chomsky