Chomsky - The Quotable Chomsky

The origins of this project are mundane. I did not set out, when I began collecting Noam Chomsky's finest lines, to arrange them into anything publishable. When I read a book, I read it always, like Chomsky himself,

Chomsky is among the most-cited thinkers and writers in historyhe sits behind the likes only of Marx, Shakespeare, the Bible and Plato As Einstein anchored the fundaments of contemporary physics, so Chomsky sired the modern study of language; the frontmost critic of American foreign policy is also the leading apostle of anarcho-syndicalism. He has made far-reaching contributions, too, to the fields of philosophy and psychology and computer science.

It should not be surprising, given all this, that he has become a subject of scholarship in his own right. In aid of what has not yet been described as "Chomsky studies," This, when one considers how popular these "Quotable" books are, is curious. I have seen or read in recent times everything from The Quotable Walt Disney to The Quotable Einstein ( to say nothing of The New Quotable Einstein and, inevitably, The Quotable Stoner: More Than 1,100 Baked, Lit-Up, and Zonked-Out Quotes in Tribute to (and as a Result of) Smoking Weed ). But, until now, no Quotable Chomsky . Perhaps the best explanation for this lacuna is that it is a difficult one to fill. Chomsky is not renowned for his rhetorical flourishes; indeed, he explicitly eschews them. He is not an obvious candidate for a book of quotations.

The fact is, however, that he expresses himself very well. His arguments (whatever you may think of their delivery) are cast in a pithy and punchy style. A better speaker than writer, he is unfair on himself when he describes his oratorical style as "boring." They never leave early or snooze or look vacant. Chomsky does not always get or take a joke, but his humour is wry and dry and disarmingly self-deprecating.

His writing, admittedly, is rather less lively. He is fond of Orwellian tropes ("Big Brother," "memory hole," "unpeople," etc.), and he resorts not infrequently to thought experiments in his linguistic and philosophical work, but otherwise he shuns metaphor and parable, and derides its overuseor even its mere useby his opponents. He is a difficult writer, and he demands an attentive reader. I have found, when my head is nodding and my eyelids are drooping, that there is nothing better accommodated to the task of despatching me to sleep than a few pages of Syntactic Structures .

His early political prose, collected in American Power and the New Mandarins and For Reasons of State , is very strong indeed. Chomsky's best writing, qua writing, is larded the least with citation.

This is a big bookbigger, certainly, than most of its genre (and far bigger, I fear, than Chomsky anticipated when he gave his permission for it). But the man has a lot to say, and he has been saying it for six decades, and The Quotable Chomsky runs the gamut of his thought and interests. I have developed two flexible criteria for the inclusion of a quotation:

1. first and frontmost, that it be well-put or well-said; and,
2. in the case of a lengthier remark, that it be in addition an effective synthesis or distillation of his views on the subject in question.

My own biases and interests have inevitably inflected my choices, but I think I have been as encompassing as reasonably possible. That this volume is self-published means that my discretion has been untrammelled. I have declined to impose any limits as to length, and have thus avoided the difficulty which confronted the editors, for example, of What Uncle Sam Really Wants : "It was very hard to compress the vast sweep of Chomsky's social thought into so small a book." I have done my utmost to comply with them.

Not included in this book are those things which Chomsky definitively did not say. This ought itself to go without saying, but a number of remarks commonly attributed to him, on the internet and elsewhere, were actually said by others. Although I was tempted, for example, to draw from the powerful "Call to Action on Sanctions and the US War against the People of Iraq" (widely circulated in January 1999, with the by-lines of Chomsky, Howard Zinn and the Edwards Herman and Said), All Chomsky did was sign it. For this reason I have generally avoided quoting petitions. And it was Nadine Gordimer, not Chomsky, who declared that "censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever." Nor did he say this:

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

That was Steven Pinker, clarifying or paraphrasing Chomsky's position. It is usually clear, in the case of Chomsky's co-authored work, which lines are his, and which his collaborator's, so I am sure that I have avoided attributing anything to him which, while appearing under his name, he did not in fact write. I have left out also those unsourced quotations which sound wrong or unlikely, or which savour of defamation. Chomsky is, sad to say, no stranger to calumny.

The structure of this book is simple. There are thirteen main headings, all of them self-explanatory. Under "Education," for example, is included academia and related concerns. "History" also embraces current affairs, or such affairs as were current when Chomsky was saying quotable things about them. All these headings, together with their subheadings, are based on the titles of the corresponding Wikipedia articles, with rare and minor exceptions. The uninitiated may consult that improving resource for further enlightenment. Although much of what Chomsky says on political and educational and historical matters could be placed under the broad heading "United States" (since that is the country on which his focus is sharpest), this would have been an unwieldy thing to do. The reader is asked to bear in mind this American-centric background when Chomsky deploys such expressions as "this country," "here," "we," and "us." He has always insisted that there is little overlap between his primary areas of study, but in some instances a quotation might fall under any number of headings. I have tried to be commonsensical. Headings and subheadings are organised alphabetically, unless it makes better sense to organise them chronologically.

This book is not a comprehensive introduction to its subject. but I have striven to forfend the recondite.