Noam Chomsky Quotes

You know, in a business, you have to operate on the basis of voluntary investment by individuals in a cause. With government, there is no voluntary effort to invest capital. It's just taken and invested. And the same accountability is not at play. The same natural forces in the economy are not at play.

Limitation of armaments in itself is economically and financially important quite apart from security.

The National Security Council's real role is to coordinate the various activities of the government of the United States in the furtherance of American foreign policy.

I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, California, a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me.

But I feel convinced, and I venture even to prophesy in this regard, that the time will come when there will also be a minister of peace in the cabinet, seated beside the ministers of war.

All the vested interests and people who profit by war will - with the journals they control - resolutely oppose any reduction of armaments.

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

We have global interests, potential threats from elsewhere, North Korea, Iran, Taiwan Straits and the like. We must be prepared for any future threat. That is why it is important that this be a transition year, 2006.

Well, first of all, we now have everybody with the exception of India, Pakistan, and Israel, and I don't think these three countries are going to join by simply providing them an incentive, in terms of technology.

We were so shocked by how fast that war went that President Bush did not have a plan, a peace plan.

The U.S. government doesn't build your computers, nor do you fly aboard a U.S. government owned and operated airline. Private industry routinely takes technologies pioneered by the government and turns them into cheap, reliable and robust industries. This has happened in aviation, air mail, computers, and the Internet.

Armaments are necessary - or are maintained on the pretext of necessity - because of a real or an imagined danger of war.

To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches.

When distrust exists between governments, when there is a danger of war, they will not be willing to disarm even when logic indicates that disarmament would not affect military security at all.

We need new partnerships for peace and security.

There is no greater responsibility resting upon peoples and governments everywhere than to make sure that enduring peace will this time - at long last - be established and maintained.

The private sector is motivated by profit and efficiency and the US government often is not.

India, Pakistan, China, Singapore and South Korea are heavily investing in nuclear arms. Since 21st century is the century of Asia, Asian countries should be the first ones to drop this arms race.

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.

I came here as a practical man, to talk, not simply on the question of peace and war, but to treat another question which is of hardly less importance - the enormous and burdensome standing armaments which it is the practice of modern Governments to sustain in time of peace.

From 1836, down to last year, there is no proof of the Government having any confidence in the duration of peace, or possessing increased security against war.

... the notion that the greater the preparation for war the smaller the probability of its occurrence might well appear a reductio ad absurdum of militarism, implying, as it does, that the only way to secure an eternal world peace is to concentrate the entire energy of all nations upon the art of war ...

It seems to me worth while for this Government to try whether it will not work on a large enough scale to be of use in the event of war.

Whenever there is talk of peace, there is anger in the military- industrial- political complex.

You'd make a great Secretary of State because State Department personnel don't answer questions completely either.