Noam Chomsky Quotes About Apathy

• It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Real, Ignorance

  "The World After September 11th". Noam Chomsky's speech at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Conference at Tufts University, Massachusetts, December 8, 2001.

• 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.

  Noam Chomsky

  Inspirational, Media, People

• In the moral calculus of currently prevailing state capitalism, profits and bonuses in the next quarter greatly outweigh concern for the welfare of one’s grandchildren, and since these are institutional maladies, they will not be easy to overcome. While much remains uncertain, we can assure ourselves, with fair confidence, that future generations will not forgive us our silence and apathy.

  Noam Chomsky

  Grandchildren, Silence, Forgiving

• We are hurtling towards self-destruction at an alarming rate thanks chiefly to an advertising and propaganda system that goads people from infancy towards apathy, isolation, passivity, helplessness and separation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Self, People, Apathy

• ...a very terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war and human suffering]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler ...or other that crop up - these people would not able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity - and therefore I think that it is in some sense the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who should share a very serious burden of guilt, that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and more violent.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Thinking, People

• Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

  Noam Chomsky

  Political, Democracy, Apathy

  Noam Chomsky (1989). “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies”, p.3, Pluto Press

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