Noam Chomsky Quotes

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be.

As to whether those who fit the common meaning of the term "intellectual" should act in the manner that [ Edward] Said prescribes, that's another question. Needless to say, I agree with him that they should, and that they commonly do not.

When we as a society lose the ability to comment on what we see and to have an opinion on what we are exposed to, then we have all lost what makes us unique on this planet.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence.

Was I going to remain an academic, sitting in an ivory tower criticizing things? Or was I going to do something as an engaged citizen.

It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking onto the matter.

It is a part of the intellectual's tragedy that the things he most values about himself and his work are quite unlike those society values in him.

Am I an intellectual? I don't think so. Less than people sometimes think, I have to say. But more than some others think.

If you start thinking about politics in an intellectual way, you are likely to be on the left because that provides a systematic solution and answer to the questions and puts it all in a system and also gives you a rather dignified and self-congratulatory place in the system. But once you started thinking, if you think about harder and longer about it, you’ll move back to what you would have been if you’d never thought at all.

For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.

Only a few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in a time of a certain intellectual supremacy--the mass never frees itself.

The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds

In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.

To understand the works of celebrated authors, to comprehend their systems, and retain their reasonings, is a task more than equal to common intellects; and he is by no means to be accounted useless or idle, who has stored his mind with acquired knowledge, and can detail it occasionally to others who have less leisure or weaker abilities.

I'm amazed at the courage of the journalists on the frontlines in Iraq, but we need intellectual courage in our community.

If you're also in the arena and you're putting your ideas out and you're owning them and you're saying "I disagree with you about this and that, I think you've got this wrong" - then not only do I invite that, I freaking love that. I love that. I'm an academic. I'm hardwired for a good debate.

The intellectual world is deeply conformist... We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense.

Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could.

I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society.

The people themselves must think, because the people alone can act.

To be ignorant and simple now-not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground-would be to throw down our weapons and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

Alike for the nation and the individual, the one indispensable requisite is character.