Noam Chomsky Quotes

I grew up as one of the few Jews in Edison, and I had people tell me they hated me because of my religion.

My childhood wasn't very happy. It's a long, grim story about being a Jew in a small southern town.

My adolescence was quite miserable, when I look back on it, at least my early part of my adolescence. Because there was anti-Semitism in Peoria, and I didn't feel that when I was in elementary school.

Montreal is a very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, erudite, educated, glorious city today. But it wasn't quite that way when I was growing up there. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. And I had to deal with that in an area of the city that had very few Jews.

When the Jews speak of humanity, they mean only the totality of Jews.

I was one of two Jewish kids in my school. We were probably one of two Jewish families in our town.

I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

Your parents don't give you much love, do they?' 'I don't need that stuff,' I told her. 'Henry, everybody needs love.' 'I don't need anything.' 'You poor boy.

All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them.

There were many times when I kept silent about being Jewish as I got older, when Jewish jokes were told.

Parents can be very influential in designing those little creepy-crawlers that jump around in your mind for the rest of your life. It's the fear of not being good enough.

If you were mean to your parents, they'd give you a good belt in the gob and send you flying across the room.

The Jew must clearly understand one thing at once, he must get out!

Of some forty families I have been able to observe, I know hardly four in which the parents do not act in such a way that nothing would be more desirable for the child than to escape their influence.

He doesn’t love me. He might still love me as I was at fifteen, when I didn’t know any better. When I trusted everyone. I’m not that person any more. He’s just a boy. He was the first to really hurt me, but he’s just a boy. There were a lot of them.

I kicked a boy in the shins in second grade for making fun of my father.

When you’re young, your world is pretty limited. My parents, my family, my church dominated my world. And because Birmingham was so segregated, I didn’t really have to encounter the slings and arrows of racism on a daily basis. Obviously, from time to time I did, like when my parents took me to see Santa Claus and he wasn’t letting black children sit on his knee. But my parents tried to insulate me as much as they could.

I don't regard Jews as a class. I regard them as a privileged misfortune.

Anything that makes your mother cry is fun

If you're raised in a house where it's okay for one group to eat and another to cook, or for one group to get more education money than the other or to be more free than the other, or where one parent gives in to the will of the other or may be verbally or even physically abused by the other. This gives you an idea of human worth.

I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while my dearest friends have been knocked down or have fallen into a gutter somewhere out in the cold night. I get frightened when I think of close friends who have now been delivered into the hands of the cruelest brutes that walk the earth. And all because they are Jews!

It was just how my parents treated me. It was the world they decided to show me. I was really sheltered. My grandmother kept me locked in the house when I was staying, you know, with the family in Soweto. And every household, for instance, had to have a registry of everyone who lived in that house.

For example, when my father was able to buy a secondhand car in the late 1930s, and he took us to the countryside for a weekend, if we looked for a motel to stay in we had to see if it said "restricted" on it. "Restricted" meant no Jews.

I'M HOPELESS, because I've lived long enough to expect things like this to continue to happen. I'm not surprised and at some point my little children are going to inherit the weight of being a minority and all that it entails.

I was a smart kid and I was not understood by my parents.