Noam Chomsky Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“In the years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about 1.5 million people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Forget what was happening in South Africa and Namibia.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Country #Years #Media
“If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Car #Pollution #Made
“Ontological questions are generally beside the point, hardly more than a form of harassment.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Form #Harassment
“Education is not for profit. If you're not in education for profit, it's not going to be a fair critique for education.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Profit #Critique
“Itâ€™s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? Theyâ€™re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. Thereâ€™s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Order #Giving #People
“I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they're becoming more diverse, like in Europe.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Europe #Doubt #Facts
“There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Too Much #Study #Reason
“Small changes can magnifiy. The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Communication #Technology #Long
“Itâ€™s a shameful moment for U.S. media when it insists on being subservient to the grotesque propaganda agencies of a violent, aggressive state.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Media #Agency #Moments
“The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Communication #Sailing #Ships
“The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Population
“Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Democracy #Definitions #Interest
“Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, itâ€™s growth in a sense...”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Growth #Example #Prison
“I don't buy much. Almost buy nothing. I buy what I need, do it the easiest way possible.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Needs #Way
“I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Attitude #Taken #Thinking
“I'm into eating as little as possible... I never cook. Never use the stove or anything.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Littles #Use #Eating
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Smart #People #Historical
“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.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Intellectual #World #Crime
“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Weed #Educational #Independent
“With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Government #Risk #Deregulation
“The police can go to downtown Harlem and pick up a kid with a joint in the streets. But they can't go into the elegant apartments and get a stockbroker who's sniffing cocaine.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Kids #Racism #Police
“The idea that you have to drop any thing that you might be interested in doing because you have to pass that test tomorrow and it's something that you're not interested in, that's just the opposite of education. It's also harming teaching, because the teachers are evaluated by the results of the test.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Teacher #Teaching #Opposites
“There have been many measures taken to try to turn the educational system towards more control, more indoctrination, more vocational training, imposing a debt, which traps students and young people into a life of conformity... That's the exact opposite of [what] traditionally comes out of The Enlightenment. And there's a constant struggle between those. In the colleges, in the schools, do you train for passing tests, or do you train for creative inquiry?”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Educational #Struggle #Taken
“A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Communication #Community #Culture
“As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Powerful #Long #Hatred
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#War #Law #President
“A captured pirate was brought before Alexander the Great. â€œHow dare you molest the sea?â€ asked Alexander. â€œHow dare you molest the whole world?â€ the pirate replied, and continued: â€œBecause I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Sea #Pirate #Navy
“In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: thatâ€™s where the decisions are made about whatâ€™s produced, how much is produced, whatâ€™s consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference-I donâ€™t want to say itâ€™s zero-but the differences are going to be very slight.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Jobs #Zero #Real
“The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think theyâ€™re being objective.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#Thinking #People #Indoctrination
“Because they don't teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.”
-- Noam Chomsky

#School #Reality #Democracy

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