Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Noam Chomsky

Quote by Noam Chomsky

“For instance, there's a college in northern California called Chico State, which is where guys like Reagan and Shultz [Reagan's Secretary of State] send their kids so they won't be infected by "lefties" at Berkeley. The place is right in the middle of four hundred miles of cornfields, or whatever it is they grow out there, a million miles from nowhere, and when you fly in you land at an airport that's about half the size of a house. Well, when I landed there, a student and a faculty member who were like the two local radicals at the school came out to meet me. And as we were walking to the car, I noticed we had to go a pretty long distance, because the airport was all surrounded with yellow police tape. So I asked these guys, "What's going on, are they rebuilding the landing strip or something?" You know what they said? "No, that's to protect the airport from Arab terrorists." I said, "Arab terrorists in northern California?" But they thought so. And when I got into the town, everybody was walking around in army fatigues and wearing yellow ribbons, saying "If Saddam comes, we're going to fight to the death," and so on.”

Quote by Noam Chomsky

Book:Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
Create image

Work

Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, born on December 7, 1928, is a renowned linguist from the United States. His research in generative grammar and transformational grammar has had a profound impact on modern linguistics. Chomsky's academic achievements extend beyond linguistics, as he is also an active political commentator and philosopher, known for his unique perspective and profound insights. more

You May Also Like

“In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.”

LifeDeathMurderAbortion20th Century1960sGunsLaw And OrderConservativesLiberals
Book:These Truths: A History of the United States
Create image

“You all are in a hopeless bind here. Standards are inescapable. Imposed standards are inescapable. You want to pretend that this is not the case, all the while vigorously telling us how you would impose them. The funniest thing about this is that you cannot see (or will not admit) what you are doing. We (conservative Christians) have a standard, we know the basis for it, and we are willing to live by it and defend it. You [progressives] have a standard, you are willing to impose it on the rest of us, but when called upon to defend or explain your standard (and why it is authoritative over all of us), you surround yourselves with a cloud of clichés. But no society can exist unless the adherents of the worldview in power are willing to act via the law as though the adherents of various minority views are just flat wrong. Just admit that this is what you are currently doing to us. The rest of your day will be sunny and filled with epistemic relief.”

GaslightingProgressivesConservativesSecularistsBy What StandardSkyhooks
Book:Apologetics in the Void: Hometown Hurly-Burly
Create image

“It is well know that it is career suicide for any person in Hollywood to be explicitly conservative. If they share any perspective that pivots away from liberal orthodoxy, they are accused of racism and branded a nazi. If they are black, they are accused of insanity.”

HollywoodConservativesBlack America
Book:Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation
Create image

“The common denominator of these views of race is that each still sees black people as a “problem people,” in the words of Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fellow American citizens with problems. Her words echo the poignant “unasked question” of W.B.B. Du Bois, who, in The Souls of Black Fold (1903): They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then instead of saying directly. How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town… Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, how does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. Nearly a century later, we confine discussions about race in America to the “problems” black people pose for whites rather than considering what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation. The paralyzing framework encourages liberals to relieve their guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at “the problem”; but at the same time, reluctant to exercise principled criticism of black people, liberals deny them the freedom to err. Similarly, conservatives blame the “problems” on black people themselves-and thereby render black social misery invisible or unworthy of public attention. Hence, for liberals, black people are to be “included” and “integrated” into “our” society and culture, while for conservatives there are to be “well behaved” and “worthy of acceptance” by “our” way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitute elements of that life.”

GovernmentPoliticsRaceConservativesLiberalsRace Politics
Book:Race Matters
Create image

“Maybe you don’t know the southside of Chicago....I grew up in a house of addiction, poverty, Government assistance, Divorce, neglect, abandonment, and violence. This wasn’t a unique experience in my neighborhood. There was a club in my school, and everyone knew who its members were: there was no hiding it. From the stink of your unwashed clothes, to Kids cracking Jokes in the lunchroom about your mom or dad being an addict, or worse. Some kids came to school with fresh bruises every week. If you were in this club, other students would rip on you. This was to be expected I suppose. But the teachers also looked at you differently. Not with empathy or even pity. More like they looked through you, As if your future was already written on your dirty clothes, and your weary eyes, on your dark skin.”

Conservatives
Book:Taken for Granted: How Conservatism Can Win Back the Americans That Liberalism Failed
Create image

“But I wrote this book To focus on an overlooked part Of my perceived accomplishments. If I achieve beyond any Statistical or cultural Expectations, If I’ve managed to play the cards I’ve been dealt With some success, it’s because 1) I’ve relied on a core set of conservative Values to make it happen; 2) I was not alone on this journey. And the best thing is: I’m just getting started.”

RepublicansConservativesConservative PoliticsConservatives In CollegeBlack ConservatismConservatives Capitalism
Book:Taken for Granted: How Conservatism Can Win Back the Americans That Liberalism Failed
Create image