Noam Chomsky Quotes

Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.

Philosophers are men hired by the well-to-do to prove that everything is all right.

There's been a thread of coverage implying that Corbyn is a decent guy but he clearly doesn't understand how the world works. Ignoring the fact that for the majority of people, it doesn't.

In my life, I've been able to really examine society in a way most people who aren't outsiders don't get a chance to do.

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.

What the power structure is afraid of is that we're going to learn to recognize the truth when we hear it.

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

I look at that fellow. I watch his smart-alack manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism, everlasting New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, Get out, Get out. You stand for everything that has been wrong with the United States for years.

Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?

America’s super-elite has been particularly effective at using the tools of a political democracy to protect its minority privilege.

The problems of elites is an old one for which Americans have found no solid answer.

Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.

Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.

The point of Left-wing propaganda is to make us feel powerless.

The ruling ideology prefers to talk about individual ethics rather than the capitalist system.

The good government of one man is the bad government of another

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

Young people must sieze the fortress of science if they want to truly replace the old guard.

The world has changed. People who care nothing about norms can no longer be dismissed as a fringe. For generations, left-wing activists have instructed students and other groups that norms are the building blocks of a rigged system that deprives them of power and denies their “selfless” desires. We don’t want to acknowledge what this has wrought. We have norms because they safeguard foundational principles, such as due process, the presumption of innocence, and freedom from unreasonable and unwarranted police prying. But the Left is no longer attached to those principles.

There's nothing more political than fantasy.

I sometimes think I was always left-wing. I know that sounds completely crazy, but I do know that I asked questions when I was about four, and I remember noticing that I wasn't getting an answer, and I remember it annoying me.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what's going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

The academic Left has a long history of taking the idea of 'false consciousness' seriously.