Noam Chomsky Quotes About Choices

• Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.

  Noam Chomsky

  Leadership, Believe, Responsibility

• The main purpose of advertising is to undermine markets. If you go to graduate school and you take a course in economics, you learn that markets are systems in which informed consumers make rational choices. That's what's so wonderful about it. But that's the last thing that the state corporate system wants. It is spending huge sums to prevent that.

  Noam Chomsky

  School, Choices, Purpose

  Speech at 25th anniversary of the International Relations Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 26, 2005.

• Democracy doesn't mean much if people have to confront concentrated systems of economic power as isolated individuals. Democracy means something if people can organize to gain information, to have thoughts for that matter, to make plans, to enter into the political system in some active way, to put forth programs and so on. If organizations of that kind exist, then democracy can exist too. Otherwise it's a matter of pushing a lever every couple of years; it's like having the choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola.

  Noam Chomsky

  Couple, Hero, Mean

  "Intervention in Vietnam and Central America: Parallels and Differences". 1985.

• 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.

  Noam Chomsky

  Science, Keys, Light

• Stability is when the U.K. and U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Choices, Regimes

• As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

  Noam Chomsky

  Loss, Choices, Decision

  Television interview, 30 Mar. 1978, in Listener 6 Apr. 1978

• When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people - along with despair about its future.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, People, Choices

  Noam Chomsky (2004). “At War with Asia”, p.194, AK Press

• Private companies can make a personal profile, direct you to things - they will say - that you would be interested in, but that's their choice not your choice.

  Noam Chomsky

  Choices, Would Be, Profile

  Interview with Jegan Vincent de Paul, chomsky.info. August 15, 2012.

• Individuals in a university - students, faculty, staff - can choose to become politically engaged, and a free university should foster a climate in which those are natural choices.

  Noam Chomsky

  University Students, Choices, Climate

  Source: www.publicanthropology.org

• We should certainly not be perpetuating further harm to others or to the environment. Suppose that workers at ExxonMobil are trying to unionize. We have two choices: to help them improve their lives, or to keep away so that their lives will be worse. Neither choice has any effect on use of fossil fuels. So radical organizers can both help them unionize and improve their lives, and convince them to find a different way to survive and work for ending the use of fossil fuels.

  Noam Chomsky

  Two, Choices, Trying

  Source: thefifthcolumnnews.com

• One can contrive a religious motivation for virtually any choice of action, from commitment to the highest ideals to support for the most horrendous atrocities. In the sacred texts, we can find uplifting calls for peace, justice and mercy, along with the most genocidal passages in the literary canon. Conscience is our guide, whatever trappings we might choose to clothe it in.

  Noam Chomsky

  Uplifting, Religious, Motivation

  "Noam Chomsky: On Trump and the State of the Union". Interview with George Yancy, www.nytimes.com. July 5, 2017.

• The human species is now at a point where it has to make choices that are going to determine whether decent survival is even possible. Environmental catastrophe, including war, maybe pandemics, these are very serious issues and they can't be addressed within the current structure of institutions. That's almost given. There have to be real significant changes, and only really effective popular mass-based movements can introduce and carry forward such initiatives, as indeed did happen during the 1930s.

  Noam Chomsky

  Real, War, Choices

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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