Avram Noam Chomsky Quotes

• Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Language

• It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Leadership, Truth

  Tags in Responsibility, Lying

• For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of ‘brainwashing under freedom’ to which we are subjected and which all too often we sere as willing or unwitting instruments.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Freedom, Lying

• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Furiously, Colorless, Ideas

• You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Against, Need, Violence

• Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that — it’s astonishing. These numbers aren’t duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You’d have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Religion

  Tags in Reason

• There are no magic answers, no miraculous methods to overcome the problems we face, just the familiar ones: honest search for understanding, education, organization, action that raises the cost of state violence for its perpetrators or that lays the basis for institutional change — and the kind of commitment that will persist despite the temptations of disillusionment, despite many failures and only limited successes, inspired by the hope of a brighter future.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Democracy

  Tags in Government, Understanding

• As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in School

• If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Politics

  Tags in Learning

• Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Unnoticed, Growth, Discontent

• 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.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Democracy, Justice

  Tags in Human Rights, Action

• The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Intelligence

  Tags in Servility

• All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Decisions

  Tags in Propaganda

• The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in History

  Tags in Perpetuate, Repression

• Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Tags in Participation

• If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

• I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Tags in Fascism

• In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued – they may be essential to survival.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Topics in Democracy

  Tags in Survival

• Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Tags in Protest, Resist

• The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert.

  Avram Noam Chomsky

  Tags in Prophecy

Avram Noam Chomsky (46)

Birth:	7th December, 1928
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Activist, Critic, Historian, Linguist, Logician, Philosopher, Professor

About

Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the elder son of noted professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and IWW member William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine. A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure.
Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 master's thesis—The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew—as transformations in the sense of Carnap's 1938 notion of rules of transformation, and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar. Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.
Chomsky joined the staff of MIT in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2010, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 55 years.

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