Noam Chomsky Quotes

We're in a 21st century, transparent and connected world.

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.

In one sense, the Internet is like the discovery of the printing press, only it's very different. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access, not just to knowledge, but to the intelligence contained in people's crania, access to the intelligence of people on a global basis.

TV ushered in the age of postliteracy. And we have gone so far beyond that. I mean, what with the Internet and Google and Wikipedia. We have entered the age of post-intelligence.

We have recently moved into an era when... everybody can share an inconceivably enormous amount of information just by stroking a few keys on a terminal.

The Internet is part of our evolution. The mystics used to say, 'We can travel across the planet in a thought.' Now we really can. We can be connected with a million people at a time.

Living in the age of information and technology, everything gets out so easy and so, so quickly.

So much of the world is digital.

The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet. So you don't have to wait for a letter to get to England in six weeks, you have almost instant communication. That was an enormous shift.

Things like social media and the Internet, of course, it's not going away. There is no cure for it. And this shouldn't be just like there shouldn't be, you know - it would have been a tragedy if there was a cure for the printing press. I think it's just that it's an amazing tool that we as a - as an animal are just getting to grips with because it's like we've grown a new ultra powerful limb and we're learning how to use it.

We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world.

I think future generations will see the invention of the Internet as having been as important as the invention of the printing press. It’s the democratizing tool of all tools. As long as no one can control the flow of information, then freedom always has a chance.

The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet's development is as historically important to humanity perhaps even more so as Gutenberg 's invention of the printing press.

If you want to be a great American, you have got to understand Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, how the American Revolution happened. I think if you want to be a good citizen of the digital age, it helps to feel comfortable with both the people and the ways of thinking that created the digital revolution.

The world wide web has really been quite spectacular and not something I would have predicted.

But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.

The Internet is this whole new world that allows everyone to communicate and exchange information and be a perfect marketplace and just accelerate everybody's lives. So, for me, the Internet was the greatest invention of mankind so far.

The speed of communication, the speed of information transfer, the cheapness of communication, the ease of moving things around the world are a difference in kind as well as degree.

People are talking about the Internet as though it is going to change the world. It's not going to change the world. It's not going to change the way we think, and it's not going to change the way we feel.

It's a whole new world out here. The online world is like a blackboard on which, when you write, the whole world can see - and I'm thrilled about this development. I want to make full use of it.

Before, revolutions used to have ideological names. They could be communist, they could be liberal, they could be fascist or Islamic. Now, the revolutions are called under the medium which is most used. You have Facebook revolutions, Twitter revolutions. The content doesn't matter anymore - the problem is the media.

The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world.