Rather, democracy is when every free citizen has authority and oligarchy is when the rich have it. Democracy is when there is a majority of free, poor men who have authority to rule, while oligarchy is when it is in the hands of the wealthy and well-born, who are a minority.

— Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky Quotes

Neoliberalism works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but when the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaningful participation in decision making.

— Noam Chomsky

The people who are known are riding the crest of some wave. Now, you can ride the crest of the wave and try to use it to get power, which is the standard thing, or you can ride the crest of the wave because you’re helping people that way, which is another thing. But the point is, it’s the wave that matters.

— Noam Chomsky

If American opinion has been uninformed, misinformed and prejudiced, the missionaries are largely to blame. Interpreting history in terms of the advance of Christianity, they have given an inadequate, distorted, and occasionally a grotesque picture of Moslems and Islam.

— Noam Chomsky

The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story – hard to understand and even harder to solve.

— Noam Chomsky

So someone can ask me what reflects my interpretation of the way things are, and I can tell them where they can get material that looks at the world the way I think it ought to be looked at-but then they have to decide whether or not that’s accurate. Ultimately it’s your own mind that has to be the arbiter: you’ve got to rely on your own common sense and intelligence, you can’t rely on anyone else for the truth.

— Noam Chomsky

Education doesn’t determine how you earn, education determines how you spend.

— Noam Chomsky

For the majority, real incomes have pretty much stagnated, sometimes declined. Benefits have also declined and work hours have gone up, and so on. It’s not Third World misery, but it’s not what it ought to be in a rich society, the richest in the world, in fact, with plenty of wealth around, which people can see, just not in their pockets.

— Noam Chomsky

Yes, it’s simple, really. If you’re riding a bicycle and you don’t want to fall off, you have to keep going – fast.

— Noam Chomsky

If you want to traumatize people, treason trials are an extreme way – if there are spies running around in our midst, then we’re really in trouble, we’d better just listen to the government and stop thinking.

— Noam Chomsky

Like, we can have big discussions about what society ought to look like in the future, which is fine, but that doesn’t affect what happens to people in their lives right now, except extremely indirectly. What happens to people in their daily lives usually depends on small, difficult, tactical assessments about where to put your time and energy.

— Noam Chomsky

Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.

— Noam Chomsky

People are called intellectuals because they’re privileged. It’s not because they’re smart or they know a lot. There are plenty of people who know more and are smarter but aren’t intellectuals because they don’t have the privilege. The people called intellectuals are privileged. They have resources and opportunities, and enough freedom has been won so that they state does not have an unrestrained capacity to repress.

— Noam Chomsky

The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. What that means is the spectrum has shifted so far to the right that what the population wants, and what was once mainstream, now looks radical and extremist.

— Noam Chomsky

Settler colonialism is a conceptual fine-tuning on the theories and histories of colonialism. Settler movements that sought a new life and identity in already inhabited countries were not unique to Palestine.

— Noam Chomsky

From anti-semite to self-hating jew, all in one day.

— Noam Chomsky

There’s plenty of challenging, gratifying, interesting, productive workaround for people to do, and there are plenty of people who want to do it – they simply aren’t being allowed that opportunity under the current economic system.

— Noam Chomsky

If people cannot rise to the level of applying to ourselves the same standards we apply to others they have no right to talk about right and wrong.

— Noam Chomsky

If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices – that’s what advertising is.

— Noam Chomsky

Don’t forget, part of the whole intellectual vocation is creating a niche for yourself, and if everybody can understand what you’re talking about, you’ve sort of lost, because then what makes you special? What makes you special has got to be something that you had to work really had to understand, and you mastered it, and all those guys out there don’t understand it, and then that becomes the basis for your privilege and your power.

— Noam Chomsky

If you decide not to make use of the opportunities you have, not to live your life in a way that’s constructive and helpful, you end up looking back and asking, ’why did I bother living?

— Noam Chomsky
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