Explore Quotes by Noam Chomsky

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects.

Meteorologists are pretty faces reading scripts telling you whether it's going to rain tomorrow.

The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.

Turkey must find its place if, of course, it can heal its internal sores, and none is more malignant than the perennial Kurdish issue.

The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.

Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily, and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society.

If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in U.S. industry, even more than elsewhere, there's layer after layer of management - a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities.

From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.

Israel is a pretty crazy state.

The call for debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

NATO's essentially run by the United States.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that's so deep in history that there's no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

Science, as everyone knows, is responsible, moderate, unsentimental, and otherwise good.

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people - along with despair about its future.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

When a politician uses the word 'folks,' we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

Popular struggles to bring about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though there is a long way to go, and there is often regression.

Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.