Noam Chomsky Quotes

In Western Europe there are now only small countries—those that know it and those that don't know it yet.

Our servants (weaker nations) are becoming our masters. You have my word: As long as there is life in me, I will spend the rest of my days fighting to restore the lost sovereignty of the United States.

I'm convinced after spending three weeks in China and Tibet, unless the United States gets its act together, our grandchildren will be living in a world dominated by the People's Republic. China is simply inexorable in its pursuit of wealth, growth and power. It cares little about human rights, democracy, labor protections, fair trade rules or the environment. It is relentless in advancing its national interests.

Indeed, often because of the size and weight in the world of our neighbor, we in Canada often define ourselves in contrast to American positions on things like Cuba, the Vietnam War and nuclear disarmament. Historically, Canada has not always been aligned with the United States. It doesn't necessarily serve anyone's interests - Canadian or American - to be seen as an extension of the United States.

Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part.

Vladimir Putin wants practical things, like the end of economic sanctions, but he also wants far greater sway in Europe and in the overall ideological trends of the world.

Germany must either be a world power or there will be no Germany

I'm an immigrant to the U.S., and I've constantly been thinking about America both from the inside and from the outside. And I've come to believe that we're living at a critical time when the American Dream is in jeopardy and this American Era which began after World War II might be winding down.

Since September 11, it seems to me that never in our lifetime, except possibly in the early stages of World War II, has it been clearer that we have as a source of strength, a source of direction, a source of inspiration - our story.

If you want to control the world you need to control the oil. Therefore the destruction of Iraq is a prerequisite to controlling oil. That means the destruction of the Iraqi national identity, since the Iraqis are committed to their principles and rights according to international law and the U.N. charter.

The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.

Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe. The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. It did not need to will all the possibilities. Even one or two offered immense gains. We and we alone were in a position to break up the play.

We are the people who won the Second World War and saved the world. We went to the moon. We gave the world the cell phone and Bruce Springsteen. There's no telling what we can accomplish.

This is not a must-win; World War II was a must-win (Referring to the Super Bowl)

We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.

If liberals had been in charge of the Arizona memorial, it would probably have featured an exhaustive exhibit about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and little about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The attitude of the West and of Russia towards a crisis like Ukraine is diametrically different. The West is trying to establish the legality of any established border. For Russia, Ukraine is part of the Russian patrimony. A Russian state was created around Kiev about 1,200 years ago. Ukraine itself has been part of Russia for 500 years, and I would say most Russians consider it part of Russian patrimony. The ideal solution would be to have a Ukraine like Finland or Austria that can be a bridge between these two rather than an outpost.

Oh, diplomacy ... it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.

I have said, and I repeat, at the risk of appearing sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War... If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what's called a detail.

The US tactical nuclear weapons are in Europe, let us not forget this. Does it mean that the US has occupied Germany or that the US never stopped the occupation after World War II and only transformed the occupation troops into the NATO forces?

The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.

If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography.

I recognize the United States is a superpower. It has various interests. It has to balance various things.

I'm hugely proud of being Irish. And I don't even know what that means. I just know that it's true.

Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.