Noam Chomsky Quotes

An anarchist is just a bourgeois turned inside out.

My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists ; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism .

Fortunately, no country was ever more suited for anarchist agitation than present-day America.

Without a revolutionary theory there cannot be a revolutionary movement.

There are Anarchists in other parts of the world who are unable to, comprehend the position of the Spanish Anarchists. I do not pretend to censor these Anarchists.

I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the '70s and became disillusioned in the '80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world.

We tried many times before to speed on the social revolution in Spain; attempted to stir up the feelings of the people and to raise the banner of Libertarian Communism.

If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the Revolution.

I don't know what the next American revolution is going to be like, but we might be able to imagine it if your imagination were rich enough.

Remember that those who fought and bled for your liberties were in their time considered as being against the law, as dangerous disturbers and trouble-makers. They not only preached violence, but they carried out their ideas …. They said that "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God." They wrote a dangerous document called the Declaration of Independence. A document which continues to be dangerous to this day, and for the circulation of which a young man was sentenced to ninety days prison in a New York Court, only the other day. They were the Anarchists of their time--they were never within the law.

The period of radical reform is finished.

The last book I read was Noam Chomsky on anarchism; maybe I will become an anarchist.

Politics is no longer being fought on traditional political lines.

I was an extreme leftist-anarchist. Now, I guess I'm a European socialist who's locked into American citizenship, without complaint.

For all those who experienced it, the Spanish Civil War was devastating.

He (Aneurin Bevan) enjoys prophesying the imminent fall of the capitalist system, and is prepared to play a part, any part, in its burial, except that of mute.

A lot of people are very political when they are young, and then they outgrow it.

I emphasized the significance of revolutionary strategy.

The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.

The rise of fascism in Europe sent most Americans home. Some black American communists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union perished in Stalin's purges of the late 1930s.

In the 60s there were a lot of things which were anarchistic. May-June '68 was riddled by anarchistic sentiments, dreams and ideals, but insofar as this was not strengthened organizationally and intellectually by a very effective, powerful infrastructure, then what happens is the movement becomes dissipated.

I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.

When I went off to college, I went believing I was a Republican. And actually I was president of Young Republicans for a couple of months and then I decided that I was much more in the camp of people like, you know, President Johnson - trying to promote civil rights, voting rights, ending poverty.

I went to the Democratic Convention as a journalist, and returned a cold-blooded revolutionary.

We cannot let the right wing roll back more than thirty years of social progress.