Noam Chomsky Quotes

The same principle that forbids me to lie does not allow me to tell the truth.

Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.

Who said to kill does not require gentleness?

In my religion I really cannot think of cases where violence is justified.

Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics'; such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.

I stand on principle where many people stand on money.

We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.

A thorough-paced antiquary not only remembers what all other people have thought proper to forget, but he also forgets what all other people think is proper to remember.

The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

People ask me if I would shoot and kill people, and I don't think I would.

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

Because you aren't who you think you are. You aren't what everyone else believes. You might have delivered countless deaths but you love more fiercely than anyone I've ever known.

Holy War is a contradiction of terms.

In fact, because people are religious, they think they can do bad things.

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

The great crime of our time, says Vonnegut, was to do too much good secretly, too much harm openly.

The highest virtue is not virtuous. Therefore it has virtue. The lowest virtue holds on to virtue. Therefore it has no virtue.

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

I never told the truth so i can never tell a lie.

I think in general the ends do not justify the means.

I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

I think most people are decent people. I don't know if they could stand the pressure he's under, but most people aspire to be decent people.

A lot of people just think that that's unreasonable or preposterous. But you know, if everybody chose to do it God's way, the world would be a lot better off.

[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.

I truly don't judge other people's actions. But I think that factory farming is an abomination.