Noam Chomsky Quotes

I think what President [Barack] Obama has done is to chart a steady course. When I was there, the first four years we had a lot of cleanup to do. We inherited a lot of bad feelings from the [George W.] Bush administration, and much of what I spent my time doing was traveling around the world reassuring friends and allies.

The real problem is Barack Obama has had six years to advocate a position to fix this and he's done nothing. The congress has funded these programs of building more fencing and doing all this and he hasn't done it.

I think that public grieving is a good thing. People need to be grieved; loss needs to be acknowledged publicly, because it helps to confer a sense of reality on the loss but also because it makes it known that this was a real life.

When we started writing this kind of music in the beginning, I didn't think that many people would listen to it, but over the years our fan base just kept growing and growing. Now, it's like we do it for us and our fans.

How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It's the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It's been two hundred years at it. It's superb.

I'm vile and perverted. I'm obsessed and deranged. I've existed for years but very little has changed. I'm the tool of the government and industry too. For I'm destined to rule and regulate you. You may think I'm pernicious, but you can't look away. I'll make you think I'm delicious with the stuff that I say. I'm the best you can get... have you guessed me yet? I'm the slime oozing out of your TV set.

The classic example I've used - I'm sure you've heard me say it before - was Mark Begich in Alaska who was here for a full six years and never had a roll call vote on an amendment on the floor of the Senate, which Dan Sullivan tells me he used on virtually a daily basis. So the notion that protecting all of your members from votes is a good idea politically, I think, has been pretty much disproved by the recent [Barack Obama] election.

There's nothing good about being certain about things. And I don't think there's any real talent in using language in a manipulative way, with phrases like "tax relief" or "Social Security reform." It's politically clever, but it's also completely disingenuous, and it's not something to aspire to.

I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.

I think Trump has made it really hard for people to read, period. He's made it hard for me anyway. Part of his evil is the way it constantly distracts us, constantly upends our horizon. To leave your computer for three hours now is to miss a year's worth of drama. This is programmatic and common to other autocratic regimes of our times.

There is one pressing need, we think, to help us compete, and that is the need to define our season, .. That relates to, first of all, creating a real season, which would include a year-long competition and a dramatic finish to that competition.

Then I know Prim is right, that Snow cannot afford to waste Peeta's life, especially now, while the Mockingjay causes so much havoc. He's killed Cinna already. Destroyed my home. My family, Gale, and even Haymitch are out of his reach. Peeta's all he has left. "So, what do you think they'll do to him?" I ask. Prim sound about a thousand years old when she speaks."Whatever it takes to break you.

The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'.

Private sector unionization is down to practically seven percent. Meanwhile the public sector unions have kind of sustained themselves [even] under attack, but in the last few years, there's been a sharp [increase in the] attack on public sector unions, which Barack Obama has participated in, in fact. When you freeze salaries of federal workers, that's equivalent to taxing public sector people.

I had two spinster aunts who were seamstresses, and of course unemployed in the 1930s, but the union gave them a life. They had a couple of weeks in the country for a union installation and they had educational programs and all sorts of things. There was a life, you know, a real community.

We look a little bit disorderly, indecisive, leaderless. That's a real problem, and that's a problem that concerns me particularly on foreign affairs. The presidency, not just President Obama, but the presidency in recent years has lost some of the terrain that they used to dominate in the making of foreign policy. I think President Obama has to make a serious effort to regain it because he lost some of it himself.

I agree with Marco [Rubio] that we can't afford another four years like the last eight years that we've had under [Barack] Obama, for sure. That we concur on. I think we need someone with proven executive leadership to be able to make that case to the American people.

Are there still other possibilities? Of course there are. What is important to recognize is that all three historical options are really there, and the choice will depend on our collective world behavior over the next fifty years. Whichever option is chosen, it will not be the end of history, but in a real sense its beginning. The human social world is still very young in cosmological time. In 2050 or 2100, when we look back at capitalist civilization, what will we think?

The conservative side of our political spectrum has had an outsized voice over the last few years. I think especially since the establishment of Fox News, which has created an echo chamber in which people just hear the same ideas repeated ad infinitum. And you know, it's just basic advertising, basically. You hear the same idea over and over again. Or you can call it propaganda if you like.

I'm telling you, [ real people] are not mad at Al-Qaeda. They are not mad at ISIS. They are not mad at [Omar] Mateen. Mateen is a victim just like they are. They are a victim of this country. These angry, irrational Looney Tunes on social media - be it people who are commenting or originally posting - these people think they're victims of this country, too. They have been taught that!

I think my main concern is because I worry about demagoguery. It's real. You see the people standing up there and applauding.

I think what democracy means today, in reality, is to a large extent, manipulated consent - not forced consent, manipulated consent - and manipulated more and more with the help of Madison Avenue.

When you're used to getting just a piece of bread for a meal, you don't realize that you can ask for a plate of pasta. You have never seen a plate of pasta. You don't even know it exists. So, to ask for it is totally out of your reality. Hopefully, at some point, either someone shows you a plate of pasta, you read about it, or you hear about it enough so that it becomes real, and it's not just a fantasy anymore, and then you start thinking "Hey, I want that pasta."

The decline of institutional Christianity over the last 40 or 50 years has empowered a side of American religion that has always been there. The sort of do-it-yourself, "create your own Jesus" kind of faith. But, the forms that faith takes do have a real reason they are so appealing.

When I say I get inspiration from my real life, I think of my real life as extending about 300 meters radius around me. So what I see in that area is what inspires me.