Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky (December 7, 1928 - ) is an American linguist and political analyst.

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On politics and economics

• "There are no conservatives in the United States."
  • Source: America's Defense Monitor and the Center for Defense Information, February 11, 1996
• "The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries, who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill."
  • Source: ZNet forum reply, December 19, 2004
• "A lot of the people who call themselves left I would regard as proto-fascists."
  • Source: A talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. Middle East policy, May 14, 1984
• "Take the Kyoto Protocol. Destruction of the environment is not only rational; it's exactly what you're taught to do in college. If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market. The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it's called democratic. Well, suppose that we believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational, because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational."
  • Source: MADRE interview, August 2001
• "The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations."
  • Source: Z Magazine article, May 1998
• "The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat."
  • Source: In Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, 1970
• "Personally I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -- there's a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy."
  • Source: Business Today, May 1973
• "I should say that when people talk about capitalism it's a bit of a joke. There's no such thing, no country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. That's right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another, the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. That's very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."
  • Source: A talk titled "Sovereignty and World Order" at Kansas State University, September 20, 1999
• "By comparative standards, the country is undertaxed. And it's also regressively taxed, the tax burden falls mostly on the poor. What we need is a progressive tax system, of, incidently, the kind that Jefferson advocated. You know, traditional libertarians, like Jefferson, advocated sharply progressive taxes, because they wanted a system of relative equality, knowing that that's a prerequisite for democracy. Jefferson specifically advocated it. We don't have it anymore, it's sort of there in legislation but it's gone. What we need is different social policies. And social policies which ought to be funded by the people who're gonna benefit from it. That's the general public. So we'd be a lot better off if we were higher taxed, and it was used for proper purposes. And we know what those are, I mean, for example, for women taking care of children. You know, it makes sense to pay them for that work, they're doing important work for the society. (applause) And they should be paid for it, but that requires tax payments. And the same is true about protection of the environment."
  • Source: A talk titled "Education and Democracy" at Michigan State University, March 28, 1995
• "I mean, what's the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth, political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same secret society where you're trained to be a ruler - they both can run because they're financed by the same corporate institutions. At the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama said, 'only in this country, only in America, could someone like me appear here.' Well, in some other countries, people much poorer than him would not only talk at the convention - they'd be elected president. Take Lula. The president of Brazil is a guy with a peasant background, a union organizer, never went to school, he's the president of the second-biggest country in the hemisphere. Only in America? I mean, there they actually have elections where you can choose somebody from your own ranks. With different policies. That's inconceivable in the United States."
  • Source: Final Edition, October 19, 2004
• "The past month was the 10th anniversary of the massacres in Rwanda, and there was much soul-searching about our failure to do anything about them. So headlines read "To Say `Never Again' and Mean it; the 1994 Rwandan genocide should have taught us about the consequences of doing nothing" (Richard Holbrooke, Washington Post); "Learn from Rwanda" (Bill Clinton, Washington Post). So what did we learn? In Rwanda, for 100 days people were being killed at the rate of about 8000 a day, and we did nothing. Fast forward to today. In Africa, about 10,000 children a day are dying from easily treatable diseases, and we are doing nothing to save them. That's not just 100 days, it's every day, year after year, killing at the Rwanda rate. And far easier to stop then Rwanda: it just means pennies to bribe drug companies to produce remedies. But we do nothing. Which raises another question: what kind of socioeconomic system can be so savage and insane that to stop Rwanda-scale killings among children going on year after year it's necessary to bribe the most profitable industry that ever existed? That's carrying socioeconomic lunacy beyond the bounds that even the craziest maniac could imagine? But we do nothing."
  • Source: ZNet forum reply, May 9, 2004

On wars

• Regarding the Kosovo War: "Let me just put the whole thing in a kind of mundane level. Like, suppose you walk out in the street, this evening, and you see a crime being committed, you know, somebody is robbing someone else. Well, you have three choices. One choice is to try to stop it, maybe you call 911 or something. Another choice is to do nothing. A third choice is to pick up an assault rifle and kill 'em both, and kill a bystander at the same time. Well, suppose you do that, and somebody says: 'well, you know, why did you do that?' And you say: 'look, I couldn't stand by and do nothing.' I mean, is that a response? If you can think of nothing that wouldn't do harm, then do nothing. And the same is true, magnified, in international affairs. Apart from the fact that there were things that could have been done."
  • Source: Panel at Columbia University, April 1999
• Regarding the Gulf War: "Strikingly, no concern was voiced over the glaringly obvious fact that no official reason was ever offered for going to war -- no reason, that is, that could not be instantly refuted by a literate teenager."
  • Source: Z Magazine article, May 1991
• With regard to Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of Mogadishu: "In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine. His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years, the United State had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out, it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to, certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical, that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of the reasons why the U.S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty. U.S. military doctrine is that U.S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say, Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of casualties, and they don't like it. But U.S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a massacre. According to the U.S., I don't know the actual numbers, but according to U.S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention was approximately in the same ball park. That's Somalia. That's what's given as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention."
  • Source: A talk titled "Sovereignty and World Order" at Kansas State University, September 20, 1999

On the 2003 invasion of Iraq

• "Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations."
  • Source: Alternative Radio interview, September 11, 2003
• "To gain control over this resource and have probably military bases there is a tremendous achievement for world control, if that's what you're aiming at. You read counter-arguments to this, and they're worth looking at. So it's argued that it can't be true, because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be greater than the profits that will be made. Well, you know, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but it's totally irrelevant. And the reason is because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be paid by the taxpayer, by you, and the profits are gonna go right into the pockets of the energy corporations. So yeah, it doesn't matter how they balance out, it's just another taxpayer subsidy to the rich."
  • Source: KGNU radio event at the University of Colorado, April 5th, 2003

On war crimes

• "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."
  • Source: If The Nuremberg Laws Were Applied... (from Radio Free Maine)
• "On May 27, the New York Times published one of the most incredible sentences I’ve ever seen. They ran an article about the Nixon-Kissinger interchanges. Kissinger fought very hard through the courts to try to prevent it, but the courts permitted it. You read through it, and you see the following statement embedded in it. Nixon at one point informs Kissinger, his right-hand Eichmann, that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." That is the most explicit call for what we call genocide when other people do it that I’ve ever seen in the historical record."
  • Source: Alternative Radio interview, June 11, 2004
• "Clinton, Kennedy, they all carried out mass murder, but they didn't think that that was what they were doing - nor does Bush. You know, they were defending justice and democracy from greater evils. And in fact I think you'd find it hard to discover a mass murderer in history who didn't think that-"
  • Source: Final Edition, October 19, 2004

On media and propaganda

• "[...] the point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything [...] that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is gonna be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about."
  • Source: WBAI interview, January 1992
• "We have a big argument here about whether Nicaragua and Cuba are sending arms to El Salvador. Well, I don't know, so far there's no evidence that they are, but that's not really the interesting question. I mean, you gotta watch the way questions are framed by the propaganda system. The way it's framed is, the doves say they're not sending arms, and the hawks say they are sending arms. But the real question, which is being suppressed in all of this, is: 'should they be sending arms?' And the answer is of course: 'yes.' (applause) Everybody should be sending arms. You see, that question is not raised. Just as if, somebody was talking in, say, the Soviet Union, and the question came up: 'should somebody send arms to Afghan rebels?' Well, of course not, you know, that's terrorism or something like that. The point is that it's perfectly legitimate to send arms to people who finally try to use violence in self-defense against a gang of mass murderers installed by a foreign power. Of course it's legitimate to send them arms."
  • Source: A talk at UC Berkeley on U.S. foreign policy in Central America, May 14, 1984
• "It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes wilful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them."
  • Source: A talk titled "The World After September 11th", AFSC Conference, December 8, 2001
• "The smart way to keep people placid and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
  • Source: quoted in Alfie Kohn's speech

On intelligence agencies

• "I can't imagine why the United States would have bombed the Chinese embassy, that's crazy. My suspicion is it's just plain ordinary incompetence. And you shouldn't be surprised at that, the incompetence of intelligence agencies is legendary. I mean, every one of which you have records at all, whether it's the CIA, or the Israeli Mossad, or British M-6 or whatever they're called, I mean, they're just error after error... Usually it's because of extreme ideological controls. In fact, their errors are not unlike those of political analysts, in the civilian sector. Which is not surprising, because they come from the same background, and they're under the same ideological controls. I mean, some of them are almost unimaginable. Let me just give you a couple of examples, which indicate to me that they're perfectly capable of bombing the wrong place on an old map. Just take Vietnam. I mean, that was the top issue in American international affairs for, you know, 30 years. And we have a record of intelligence, very unusual record of intelligence, because it was not released by the government, it was stolen from them. So it's like capturing enemy archives. That's the Pentagon Papers. That's a 25-year record of high level intelligence, raw intelligence, CIA, DIA, whole bunch, State Department intelligence. A lot of it is in there, and it's very intriguing to look at it. In fact, the most interesting revelation of the Pentagon Papers in my view by far is the intelligence record. Here's roughly what happened, if you're interested I've gone through it in print in detail, but here's the main story. In the late 1940s, the United States was kind of unclear about which side to support. That was true in Indonesia, it was true in Vietnam. You know, do you support the colonial power that's trying to reconquer it, or do you support the indigenous government and then try to take them over, that was their question. (laughter) And they made different decisions in different places. In the case of Indochina, for whatever reason, they decided at one point to support France, in it's reconquest of Indochina. Well, at that point, essentially orders went to the U.S. intelligence communities, CIA and others, to demonstrate what was required. What was required to justify the support of France was that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were agents of either the Russians or the Chinese, didn't really matter, one or the other. But they had to be agents of the international communist conspiracy. OK, that would then justify support of the French reconquest. Everyone knew that was untrue, but that was plainly required for doctrinal reasons in order to support France and it's reconquest. OK, then comes a comic opera scene, for about 3 years, in which U.S. intelligence tries to prove what is necessary, that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh are agents of the international communist conspiracy. And they tried, and tried, either China or Russia, they didn't care, anything would do. They couldn't do it, they couldn't find anything. They came back, occasionally they'd say well we think we found copy of Pravda in the Bangkok legation, or something. But finally the intelligence concluded, look, this is very weird, but that is the only place in South East Asia where a nationalist movement has no connections at all with China or Russia. OK, what was the conclusion? The conclusion in the State Department was, OK, this proves that they're agents of the international communist conspiracy. Ho Chi Minh is such a loyal slave of, pick it, Mao or Stalin, that he doesn't even need orders. (laughter) He just does it automatically, so you don't even have to have connections. From that point on, U.S. intelligence never investigated the question of whether the North Vietnamese, the Vietnamese but that's what they were, were following their own national interest. That issue was not discussable. In fact, in this 25-year record, turns out there's one staff paper, which was never even submitted, that raises the possibility that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were concerned with their own national interests instead of acting as agents of the international communist conspiracy. Well you know, anybody with a head screwed on knew that they were following national interests, but U.S. intelligence could not contemplate that possibility because it was doctrinally unacceptable. That's very similar to what was going on in the academic world, I should say. And you can't imagine a more dramatic case, I don't know which to call it, incompetence or whatever, doctrinal control. And this happens all the time. Take, say, the Israeli Mossad, which has a reputation for fantastic insights and so on. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with the intention of destroying secular Palestinian nationalism, that was the goal, it was basically an attack on the PLO. OK, what did they get? Well, they ended up with a fundamentalist islamic movement which drove them out of Lebanon, Hezbollah. Israel's major defeat, they were expelled from most of Lebanon by resistance movement which was basically islamic fundamentalist. OK, they did destroy the secular PLO and instead what they got was a islamic fundamentalist movement that they couldn't control, drove them out of most of Lebanon. What did they do next? They did exactly the same thing in the West Bank. They undermined the secular PLO, and they ended up with Hamas on their hands, which they can't control. And they don't understand it, they just keep making the same mistake over and over again. It's just out of ideological fanaticism. And I think you find that wherever you look at intelligence activities. The idea that they could use a 3-year old map and aim at the wrong building doesn't sound very surprising to me."
  • Source: A talk titled "Sovereignty and World Order" at Kansas State University, September 20, 1999

On corruption

• "My view, for what it's worth, is that Kennedy was probably the most dangerous president we've had. (applause) There was a really dangerous, macho streak there, which was kind of fanatic. A lot of it is coming out now in the coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is quite revealing. It looks even worse than it looked before. And an awful lot of this willingness to drive the world to total destruction looks like a matter of protecting your macho image. Now, that kind of stuff is really dangerous. It's much better — the best political leaders are the ones who are lazy and corrupt. It's the ones who are after power — they are the dangerous ones. So the guys who want to watch television and sleep and so on, they are no big problem. I should say the same about corruption. Corruption is a very positive sign of government. You should always be in favor of corruption. If people are interested in enriching themselves or in sex or something like that, then they are not interested in power. And the most dangerous thing is the guys that want power. That's what Kennedy was like, I think. Furthermore, corruption has a way of being exposed for quite simple reasons. When people are corrupt, they are usually robbing other rich people. Therefore they are going to block people and when corruption gets exposed it weakens power. And so that's one of the ways you can defend yourself. The same is true of the evangelicals. If we had evangelicals who were really after power, we'd be in trouble. If all they want is gold Cadillacs and sex and so on, no big problem. That's good."
  • Source: A talk titled "Necessary Illusions" at MIT, May 10, 1989

On drugs

• "Having a substance should not be considered a crime, because so far it's victimless. If you want to talk about distributing substances that are lethal, yeah, that oughta be brought up, but then, let's be serious. Tobacco is far ahead of anything else. Alcohol is second. Hard drugs are way down the bottom, and furthermore most drug use, though it's very harmful for the person, has very little social effect. The crime associated with hard drugs is mostly a consequence of criminalization. If the principle is, let's not get lethal substances out to the public, the first one you'd go after is tobacco, the next one you'd go after is alcohol, way down the list you'd get to cocaine, and sort of invisibly low you'd get to marihuana. [Q: a lot more violence comes from someone snorting some coke?] No it doesn't, it comes from purchasing coke and selling coke, but that's because it's illegal. That's because of the criminalization of it, not the effect. There're good studies of this. Tobacco doesn't happen to cause violence, but alcohol definitely does. The deaths that are alcohol related are way beyond the deaths that are hard drugs related, if you separate, in the hard drugs case, the deaths that are the result of criminalization. So yeah, when you have drug gangs and narcotraffickers fighting for turfs and so on, sure, then there's gonna be plenty of killings. Just like when you had Al Capone running Chicago. But that's a consequence of the criminalization, not the drugs. What drugs tend to do is make people passive. Alcohol on the other hand makes them violent. There're extensive studies in the criminality literature, and you can take a look at the results. The basic result is that tobacco related deaths are way beyond anything else, just an order of magnitude greater. Furthermore those are not just to the user, they're to everybody else. So deaths from passive smoking alone are much higher than drug related deaths. Furthermore they're transferred on to the next generation. Alcohol is the next biggest killer, and it's a killer not only to the people who use it, which is bad enough, but also to others, because of its relation to violence. Next is things like hard drugs, and they are rarely harmful to others, they're harmful to the user. When you get down to marihuana, last time I looked there had been about 60 million users and not one known case of overdose. I mean it's not good for you, undoubtably, but it's probably at the level of coffee. And in fact notice that there has never been a medical reason for criminalizing marihuana. I've looked through the history of this if you're interested, I don't know if you want me to run through it, but it's an interesting history. Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people, or working people. So for example in England in the 19th century, there was a period when gin was criminalized and whiskey wasn't, because gin is what poor people drink. That's kinda like the sentencing for crack and powder. In the early stages of Prohibition in the United States, one of the targets was immigrant workers, these guys hanging around the saloons in New York, gotta go after them. The rich guys in upstate New York, they're gonna drink no matter what, you know, they wanna come home after work, they'll drink. But, go after those guys. What about marihuana? Marihuana was brought in by Mexicans, and the first criminalization of marihuana was in the southwest, in the states. It was in New Mexico, later Utah, and so on, and it was specifically targeted against Mexicans. It didn't get criminalized in the United States until shortly after Prohibition ended. After Prohibition ended we had this huge bureau of narcotics, and it had to do something. So they discovered, you know, that marihuana is gonna do all kind of terrible things to you. The senate testimony about this is mind-boggling. They did have a representative of the American Medical Association, who said we don't have any medical evidence about this. He was shut up, denounced, you know, get rid of him right away. Then they found somebody else, this is literally true, they found a pharmacologist, a guy teaching at Temple University, who was doing experiments with marihuana and dogs. The testimony is hilarious, you really have to read it. They brought this guy and he testified that when he gave marihuana to dogs they went insane, you know, they'd do all kind of things. And then, some senator or somebody asked him, this is from memory, so it's probably a little off, but something like this, it's in the thirties, they asked the guy, well have you ever tried marihuana on humans? So he said, yeah, he tried it on himself. And he said, well, what happened? He said, I turned into a vulture, I started flying around the room. So they, oh my god, this stuff is terrible, it makes people insane. And it was declared by Congress that marihuana makes people insane. But then something happened. It turned out that lawyers, defense lawyers, got the idea, OK, I can use this for an insanity defense. So if a guy who killed 3 cops, his lawyer would say, well, you know, he had marihuana before so he was insane, so you can't do anything. And people were getting off on charges, like cop killing for example, on the claim that they had marihuana. So all of the sudden it was discovered that marihuana doesn't make you insane. Congress decided, sorry, it doesn't make you insane, because we wanna wipe that out. The next idea was, marihuana is an entry drug, it's the drug you take and then you go on to something else. Well, there was never any evidence for that, but that was decided. And then in the early fifties, something else happened, marihuana is being brought in here by Red Chinese to poison the American population and destroy us. So therefore we gotta stop marihuana. And it kinda goes on like this. Actually, the peak of marihuana use was as I said, in the seventies, but that was rich kids, so you don't throw them in jail. And then it got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw people in jail for it, when it was poor people. That's roughly the history. The detailed history is quite interesting."
  • Source: Dialogue with trade unionists, February 2, 1999

On oppression

• "If you had asked my grandmother whether she is oppressed, she probably wouldn't have understood what you are talking about; that's life. If you'd asked my mother, you'd have found that she resented it, but accepted it, as life. If you'd ask my daughters, they'd tell you to get lost. That reflects hard-won victories for freedom."
  • Source: ZNet forum reply, December 26, 2004

On history

• "There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much." (context: João Goulart)
  • Source: "The World After the Iraq Invasion", KGNU radio event at the University of Colorado at Boulder, April 5th, 2003 [1]

On religion

• "You can find things in the traditional religions which are very benign and decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean, the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible - not only did He order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide - I mean, wipe out every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on, because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert - not only did He do things like that, but, after all, the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That's the story of Noah. I mean, that's beyond genocide - you don't know how to describe this creature. Somebody offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive - that's supposed to be gentle and wonderful."
  • Source: Final Edition, October 19, 2004
• "Elijah was what we would nowadays call a dissident intellectual, like most of the prophets were, giving geo-political analysis, calling for moral behavior. [King Ahab] calls for Elijah, he said why you are a hater of Israel? What does that mean? You are criticizing me. I'm the king. I'm Israel. And therefore you're a hater of Israel. And that's what the concept means. If you identify the country, the people, the culture with the rulers, accept the totalitarian doctrine, then yeah, it's anti-Semitic to criticize the Israeli policy, and anti-American to criticize the American policy, and it was anti-Soviet when the dissidents criticized Russian policy."
  • Source: Noam Chomsky on the State of the Nation, Iraq and the Election, Democracy Now!, October 21st, 2004
• "But if you look at the biblical record, at the time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned."
  • Source: Conversations with History, March 22, 2002

On artificial intelligence

• "[...] A lot of sophistication has been developed about the utilization of machines for complex purposes, and it doesn't make sense not to use it if you can think of a good question to ask. Playing chess is about the dumbest question you can ask. But, if you want, maybe can make money that way, or something. In fact, what's going on with the chess is about as interesting as the fact that a front-end loader can lift more than an Olympics champion, weight lifter, or something. Probably so, but, you know, these are just not serious questions. [...]"
  • Source: A talk titled "Language & Mind", 1997 [2]

About Chomsky

Press

• "Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today. He is also a disturbingly divided intellectual. On the one hand there is a large body of revolutionary and highly technical linguistic scholarship, much of it too difficult for anyone but the professional linguist or philosopher; on the other, an equally substantial body of political writings, accessible to any literate person but often maddeningly simple-minded. The 'Chomsky problem' is to explain how these two fit together."
  • Source: Paul Robinson, The New York Times Book Review, February 25, 1979

• "Yet [Chomsky's The Responsibility of Intellectuals essay] defined the peace movement as much as any document and pushed the name Chomsky up there with Thoreau and Emerson in the literature of rebellion."
  • Source: Rolling Stone, May 28, 1992 [3]

Political writers

• "As I read your remarks about how Kosovo reverses the usual left/right roles on intervention, I found myself wondering what Noam Chomsky--who epitomized the left-wing view that all bad things are the result of Western intervention--is saying now. Well, I couldn't find anything about the current crisis, but thanks to the miracle of search engine technology I did find some remarks about Bosnia, which are pathetic but revealing: First he tries to blame it all on the Western Right, then suddenly gets all judicious and practical."
  • Paul Krugman, March 29, 1999 [4]

• "I'm not a pacifist. And I am not one of those people, like Noam Chomsky, with whom I have agreed on some points, I don't agree on this point, who believes that all uses of American imperial power are by definition wrong. I suppose in fact I might be called, in a certain stretch, a liberal imperialist. I believe there are times when great powers can intervene to prevent atrocities, and should."
  • Susan Sontag, March 2, 2003 [5]

• "He defended Faurrison. He championed the Khmer Rouge. His condemnations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are one hundred percent one-sided, based on the (obviously) false notion that the Arab nations and the Palestinian people have been trying to arrange a peace with Israel for decades. He viewed the rescue mission undertaken in Kosovo as nothing more than the extension of imperial power. He accuses the United States of perpetrating a holocaust in Afghanistan and thinks that the mistaken attack on the pharmaceutical factory in Somalia [sic] was as bad if not worse than the attack on the Twin Towers. One could go on, but it all adds up to, I fear, the mirror image of the ignorant jingoism of Bennett, Krauthammer, Kelly, Will, etc. And I find it amazing that intelligent people take it seriously."
  • Eric Alterman, June 2002 [6]

• Regarding the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory bombing death toll: "It’s a very vulgar, arithmetical, pragmatic way of arguing anyway. If you do that, then get the facts and figures wrong, well then you’re really fucked. You’re fucked twice.”
  • Christopher Hitchens, May 2002 [7]

• "Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: "Western and also Thrid World intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals." Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power's sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right. [...] According to Noam Chomsky, communism "was a monstrosity," and "the collapse of tyranny" in Eastern Europe and Russia is "an occasion for rejoicing for anyone who values fredom and human dignity." I treasure freedom and human dignity yet find no occasion for rejoicing. The postcommunist societies do not represent a net gain for such values. If anything, the breakup of the communist states has brought a colossal victory for global capitalism and imperialsim, with its correlative increase in human misery, and a historic setback for revolutionary liberation struggles everywhere."
  • Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, 1997

Bloggers

• "There are some views­, people who support the Soviet Union, as Chomsky did for so long, who’ve supported tyranny in all sorts of places, like Chomsky has done, who have lied consistently, as Chomsky has done, who do not deserve fundamental respect in this sense. [...] And he is making millions around the world preaching anti-American-"
  • Andrew Sullivan, November 5, 2004, [8]

• "In any case, Chomsky's problem is not that he's anti-War -- this "war" is getting sillier by the minute - the problem is that he's an idiot."
  • Duncan Black (Atrios), May 15, 2002 [9]
  • (Atrios later admitted he's "never really read" Chomsky.[10])

• With regard to refuting Chomsky's arguments: "It's easy, but fun."
  • Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), May 12, 2002 [11]

Software developers

• "I don't have as complete and overall philosophy as he does. I agree with some of the things he says. I've seen things that he said that I didn't agree with. But certainly what he says about the engineering of consent seems valid. Recently Chomsky gave a speech about what it means to oppose terrorism which I was very impressed by, because he essentially said that we should put an end to terrorism, and that includes the terrorism against the US but also the terrorism committed by the US... and I agree."
  • Richard Stallman, November 2001 [12]

• "A similar denial is evident it the rhetoric of Noam Chomsky; prodded for commentary on the war, he recites a litany of past American wrongdoing as if that somehow banishes the question of how soon Saddam Hussein will have nuclear weapons and what he will do with them when he gets them."
  • Eric Raymond, September 13, 2002 [13]

• "Neither Chomsky nor Church would make my top ten list. No, I don’t actually have such a list, but my feeling is that their impact has been more on what is taught than what is done. Part of my unease is that I’m uncertain to what extent ‘Computer Science’ is a science. I feel more comfortable comparing what my colleagues and I do with the activities of architects and engineers than with mathematicians, physicists, or biologists. There are things in software that feel more as if they have been discovered than invented, but most of what [passes] for computer science is purely man-made."
  • Bjarne Stroustrup [14]

Science fiction authors

• "People are wasting time on dissident relics like Noam Chomsky. Professor Chomsky is a pretty good dissident: he's persistent, he means what he says, and he's certainly very courageous, but this is the 21st century, and Stallman is a bigger deal. Lawrence Lessig is a bigger deal."
  • Bruce Sterling, July 26, 2002 [15]

• "And when I did reality checks against the idiotic, immoral, anti-American, vicious things he says, I find him a moral wasteland, and a fool. And I'll defend that with anybody, and I'll get out the books and the sources and the documentation..."
  • Orson Scott Card, November 2004 [16]

Linguists

• "What he does in linguistics is exactly what he campaigns against in politics. He feeds off people. He doesn't allow anyone to disagree with him."
  • George Lakoff, April 27, 1995 [17]