Noam Chomsky Quotes on Time
Noam Chomsky's remarks touching time, gathered here, are concerned above all with history and its uses. A recurring theme is that historical memory is uncomfortable and therefore neglected: there is a good reason why nobody studies history, he observes drily, since it just teaches you too much. Chomsky insists that present events cannot be understood without their history, noting even of a contested recent act that, whatever its character, it has a history. Several passages here come from his controversial interventions in the historical record of his own time, including his writing on Cambodia and on the Watergate scandal. Drawn from his interviews and books, these passages treat the honest study of history as a civic necessity, and the reluctance to undertake it as a political fact in its own right.
Quotes
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“Annexing of the land in Crimea, I think, was a criminal act. But it has a history.”
2016 | Noam Chomsky, Al Jazeera ‘UpFront’ interview with host Mehdi Hasan on ISIL, Turkey and Ukraine, (Jan 23, 2016) -
“There's a good reason why nobody studies history. It just teaches you too much.”
2003 | KGNU benefit at the University of Colorado at Boulder , April 5, 2003 (context: João Goulart ) [71] -
“[…] the evacuation of Phnom Penh , widely denounced at the time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives.”
After the Cataclysm(1979) -
“In "Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics" by Paul Street [99] , 2008.”
2007–09 -
“In these tumultuous times, Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion is important, because a functioning democracy requires active citizen participation in setting social policy.”
Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion(2020) -
“If we try to keep a sense of balance, the exposures of the past several months are analogous to the discovery that the directors of Murder, Inc. were also cheating on their income tax. Reprehensible, to be sure, but hardly the main point.”
1970s | " Watergate: A Skeptical View ," New York Review of Books (September 20, 1973).