Noam Chomsky Quotes

All nations are more tolerant of their own mistakes and weaknesses than of the mistakes and weaknesses of others.

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

Here is a man with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.

To talk of resisting what is called public opinion as a crime, is to make Socrates an anarchist and Jesus Christ a felon.

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

As soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And ... the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

The message bombarding young adults from the leftist cultural elite is clear; you should think for yourself... by adopting my beliefs as your own.

America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.

Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.

The best causes tend to attract to their support the worst arguments, which seems to be equally true in the intellectual and in the moral sense.

The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.

Anybody who French bashes just might as well wear a badge that says 'I am a follower! I don't think for myself and I have no idea what I'm talking about.' That would be a French basher.

All the wisdom of the world consists of shouting with the majority.

Never follow a follower who is following someone who has fallen. Its why the whole world is falling apart.

It's fine to criticize somebody else's crimes and misdeeds, but you don't talk about your own. The only exception is a country that is defeated. And even that is rather nuanced.

The man who accepts opinions because they have been entertained by distinguished people, is a mental snob.

If you're not upsetting idiots, you might be an idiot.

All agreed that Quickset was the cleverest cat in the world. And, since Quickset had the same opinion, it was surely true.

To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.

Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?

May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

People have to live by rules in the world. Why do we pretend in school that they don't?

If obedience is the result of the instinct of the masses, revolt is the result of their thought.