Noam Chomsky Quotes: 13

• I hope that a move toward clemency with Judge Afiuni would be a step towards the importance of maintaining a properly functioning justice system.

• Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.

• We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.

• The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa's major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.

• The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.

• Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

  Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

• I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.

• Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

• That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.

• Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.

• Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?

• The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.

  The Essential Chomsky

• If you're independent-minded in school, you're probably going to get in trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's being preferred or cultivated.

  Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian