Quote

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.

Noam Chomsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Linguist
Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
Chomsky
Politics
Despise
Freedom
Precisely
Free
Favor
Really
Favors
Liked
Otherwise
Speech
Goebbels
Views
Stalin

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

Image
Legalizing marijuana would make a lot of sense, I don't think there's a single case of marijuana overdose on record and tens of millions of users. It's much less dangerous than alcohol, for example.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The 'anti-globalisation movement' is the most significant proponent of globalisation - but in the interests of people, not concentrations of state-private power.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.
Noam Chomsky
Image
As international support for Obama's decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world.
Noam Chomsky
Image
In fact, I was in a lab that was a hundred percent funded by the Pentagon, and it was one of the centers of the organized antiwar resistance movement.
Noam Chomsky
Image
There is a considerable polarization taking place here, increasing the gap between rich and poor. It's most dramatic in Third World countries, of course, but in the rich countries it's also very noticeable.
Noam Chomsky
Image
It is reported that about 30% of the world's population is unemployed. That's worse than the Great Depression, but it's now an international phenomenon.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Farming out atrocities to paramilitaries is standard operating procedure.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The similarity is that concentration of capital influences virtually everything that goes on. It influences the way the media functions, it very powerfully influences how the government works and it of course influences corporate sector elements, like say how Google or Amazon present materials that reach the public.
Noam Chomsky
Image
If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course) the US wants to maintain it. An interesting story. There seems to me no easy way out of this.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Those are possibilities for technology, which don't tend to be used, because of the way power is concentrated. There are all kinds of possibilities, including for coercion. In China, technology is used to control and coerce. Here too, to an extent, but not to that extent.
Noam Chomsky
Image
America is a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn't survive very long if they did that.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Take, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances.
Noam Chomsky
Image
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
Noam Chomsky
Image
I don't suggest that the observations are surprising or profound. Rather, they seem to me the merest truisms. I was not aware that [ Michel] Foucault had used the phrase speaking truth to power. I had thought it was an old Quaker phrase.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Sooner or later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous.
Noam Chomsky
Image
In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It's hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce.
Noam Chomsky