211 quotes
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was clearly provoked while the U.S. invasion of Iraq was clearly unprovoked.
Hand-built by a combination of militant labor action, CIO organizing, sit down strikes and a sympathetic administration. That combination is crucial.
AOC & Noam Chomsky: The Way Forward + transcript (2021)
I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled.
Moral equivalence is a term of propaganda that was invented to try to prevent us from looking at the acts for which we are responsible. ...There is no such notion.
We like to forget the history.
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.
In American Power and the New Mandarins (1969)
Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.
It's certainly true that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, and also without the people who supported him through his worst atrocities, and are now telling us about them.
Remember, the U.S. is a powerful state, it's not like Libya. If Libya wants to carry out terrorist acts, they hire Carlos the Jackal or something. The United States hires terrorist states.
The hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards that he applies to others. By that standard, the entire commentary and discussion of the so-called "war on terror" is pure hypocrisy, virtually without exception.
Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times (2002)
There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason.
Well in the Western propaganda system, what we hear is Ukrainian people want more and more arms. That's the U.S. and British propaganda system.
I’m not an absolute pacifist. I think there are times when the use of military force is defensible […] Defending the Kurds against the ISIL attacks—yes, that’s legitimate.
Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism than the rest of the world combined and, therefore, in the American ideological system it is regarded as the source of international terrorism, exactly as Orwell would have predicted.
It is highly advantageous for the business world to foster hatred for pointy-headed government bureaucrats and to drive out of people's minds the subversive idea that the government might become an instrument of popular will, a government of, by and for the people.
There are many facts about language and linguistic behavior that require explanation beyond the fact that such and such a string (which no one may ever have produced) is or is not a sentence. It is reasonable to expect grammars to provide explanations for some of these facts.
Syntactic Structures (1957)
Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn't refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.
You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow.
Looking back, though, we can see that the Japanese had very real grievances, and that the United States had quite a significant share of responsibility in those grievances back in 1941.
The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? (1967)
Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.