Noam Chomsky Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines that everybody else is saying,... [o]r else you say something which in fact is true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune. Propaganda and the Public Mind

2. Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?

3. I’ve actually written about it, he [Wittgenstein] talks about how language developed … couple of people are together. One of them points to it rock and says rock, and the other one says a rock. It’s just not even remotely like that. That’s just off the spectrum of discussion. None of these things happen. That’s not the way language develops at all. In fact, the concepts of our mind, you can easily show, are much richer than anything that’s presented.

4. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.

5. 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.

6. Sometimes when I'm having a boring interview on the telephone, and I'm trying to think about something else because the questions are too boring, and I start looking around the room where I work, you know, full of books piled up to the sky, all different kinds of topics. I start calculating how many centuries would I have to live reading twenty-four hours a day every day of the week to make a dent in what I'd like to learn about things, it's pretty depressing.[...] You know, we have little bits of understanding, glimpses, a little bit of light here and there, but there's a tremendous amount of darkness, which is a challenge. I think life would be pretty boring if we understood everything. It's better if we don't understand anything... and know that we don't, that's the important part.

7. The beginning of science is the recognition that the simplest phenomena of ordinary life raise quite serious problems: Why are they as they are, instead of some different way? Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures

8. The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values. The Essential Chomsky