Boston, Massachusetts 

Noam Chomsky turns 80 today. American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer, the New York Times calls him “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” Publisher of more than 100 books, Chomsky is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (he became well known in the academic and scientific community as “the father of modern linguistics”—since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a libertarian socialist intellectual).

Hardly a minute has passed in the last half-century, it seems, when Chomsky has not been pouring out ideas and passions. So polarizing is his effect that the world seems split between Chomskyites and anti-Chomskyites.

Some quotable Chomsky quotes:

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.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued—they may be essential to survival.

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.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—“indoctrination,” we might say—exercised through the mass media.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.