Noam Chomsky Quotes

I'm not radical.

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally then to succeed unconventionally.

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.

I think our Western society is very much about, 'Tuck your head in; make sure you're safe. Don't rock the boat.'

There are times when the voice of repining is completely drowned out by various louder voices: the voice of government, the voice of taste, the voice of celebrity, the voice of the real world, the voice of fear and force, the voice of gossip.

If an idea is indeed sensible, it will eventually become just part of the accepted wisdom.

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.

I am normal. In fact, I think I might be more normal than anyone else.

I was a normal, rather dutiful child. I didn't even rebel as a teenager.

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

I'm mainstream.

I am a Conservative, so I don't wish to be seen as a rebel, particularly, at all.

Throughout high school, I was fairly boring. I didn't do many rebellious things.

There are many people for whom 'thinking' necessarily means identifying with existing trends.

Sometimes, instead of going down the road less taken, you just charge down the beaten path.

The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future.

Well, it's not just money. I consider myself establishment right now. I'm borderline establishment, I'm hanging on by my toenails - but I'm establishment.

I wouldn't say I'm normal. But I'm relatively stable. When I think of normal, I think of mediocrity, and mediocrity scares the f--- out of me.

All my friends are super normal.

Be commonplace and creeping and you'll be a success.

The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States, but here the critic is silenced. The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.

Normal means lack of imagination and creativity.

People who say the system works work for the system.