211 quotes
I never criticized United States planners for mistakes in Vietnam. True, they made some mistakes, but my criticism was always aimed at what they aimed to do and largely achieved.
The central doctrine of Cartesian linguistics is that the general features of grammatical structure are common to all languages and reflect certain fundamental properties of the mind.
Cartesian Linguistics (1966)
Take the United States today, it is living under a kind of totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime and is much worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev.
Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: "What kind of peace?"
Talk at University of California, Berkeley (1984)
The Sunrise Movement is one of the, at the forefront of activism on climate.
AOC & Noam Chomsky: The Way Forward + transcript (2021)
I think that support for Ukraine’s effort to defend itself is legitimate.
However, I still think it’s not quite the right question.
The main part of politics is activism and mobilization.
AOC & Noam Chomsky: The Way Forward + transcript (2021)
Stability means we run it. There are countries that are very stable. Cuba is stable, but that's not called stability.
Now, it's a little wrong to say that the people die. The fact is, they don't die.
Talk at University of California, Berkeley (1984)
The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats.
Intrinsic (psychological) structure is rich . . . and diverse.
Rules and Representations (1980)
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.
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
Syntactic Structures (1957)
I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust
I see no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson's work.
Cartesian linguistics was not concerned simply with descriptive grammar, in this sense, but rather with “grammaire générale,” that is, with the universal principles of language structure.
Cartesian Linguistics (1966)
No less insidious is the cry for 'revolution,' at a time when not even the germs of new institutions exist, let alone the moral and political consciousness that could lead to a basic modification of social life.
American Power and the New Mandarins (1969)
It is very difficult to retain a faith in the "essential humanity" of the SS trooper or the Commissar or the racist blinded with hate and fear, or, for that matter, the insensate victim of a life of anti-communist indoctrination.
The revolutionary pacifism of A.J. Muste: On the backgrounds of the Pacific War (1969)
The "corporatization of America" during the past century has been an attack on democracy—and on markets, part of the shift from something resembling "capitalism" to the highly administered markets of the modern state/corporate era.
Profit Over People (1999)
The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction - all of us who would have remained silent, had stability and order been secured.
American Power and the New Mandarins (1969)