Noam Chomsky Quotes

No state, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.

The armed beggary of the nation.

Pakistan will never be able to match the Indian militarily and the effort to do so is taking an immense toll on the society. It's also extremely dangerous with all the weapons development.

As far as Japan is concerned, I want to help all of our allies, but we are losing billions and billions of dollars. We cannot be the policemen of the world. We cannot protect countries all over the world.

The Pentagon budget, like all government spending, is an expression of priorities.

Armaments; extremely useful for fighting wars, a deadweight in any civil economy.

During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.

It will be sufficient to point to the enormous burdens which armaments place on the economic, social, and intellectual resources of a nation, as well as on its budget and taxes.

We need to stop spending money on those weapons systems that do not advance national security.

When the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer.

… war is a matter not so much of arms as of money

It is not how much you spend on defense as much as how you spend it.

From birth, Pakistan was saddled with a huge army it could not pay for and plenty of monsters to destroy.

It is, of course, true that I have given priority to the settling of the problem of security and the problem of Irian Barat, although I knew that in order to do these things, almost three-quarters of our national product had to be spent.

Chinese military spending is carefully monitored by the United States.

John McCain is the guy that has advocated for war everywhere. He would bankrupt the nation.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

I certainly wouldn't say that we loved the arms race. Trillions of dollars were used to stoke it. For our economy, which was smaller in size than the American economy, it was a burden. But one cannot agree with the statement that the arms race played the key role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Militarism is in direct competition with people's needs for food, health care, and environmental protection.

So-called defense now absorbs sixty per cent of the national budget, and about twelve per cent of the Gross National Product.

World's major powers, including China and Russia, don't want to 'finance' American military adventures anymore.

I refuse to accept that the world is so poor, when just one week of global spending on armies is enough to bring all of our children into classrooms.

Militarism is the most energy-intensive, entropic activity of humans, since it converts stored energy and materials directly into waste and destruction without any useful intervening fulfillment of basic human needs. Ironically, the net effect of military, as opposed to civilian, expenditures is to increase unemployment and inflation.

I cannot but say a word and look my disapproval when I hear that my country is spending millions for war and war engines-more, I have heard, than twice as much as the entire public school system costs the nation.

I believe that the military-industrial complex is more important than ever. This is because the war in Kosovo gave fresh impetus not to the military-industrial complex but to the military-scientific complex. You can see this in China.