Noam Chomsky Quotes

Less than seventy-five years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.

Capitalism works better than it sounds, while socialism sounds better than it works.

Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.

What if capitalism is unsustainable, and socialism is impossible?

I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.

A basic contradiction between socialism and the market economy does not exist.

The left hates capitalism, not because of freedom and liberty - although they do. But the primary they hate capitalism is that it is the most efficient engine to create wealth for the greatest number of people in a society that has ever been devised. Nobody's ever claimed it's perfect. Nobody's ever said it's flawless. But it's better than anything else out there, particularly anything left has to offer.

I think the thing about capitalism is it's an evil necessity, capitalism. Communism has been tried and failed, and socialism, that doesn't work very well. Capitalism works, but the problem about capitalism is it does mean that a few individuals become very wealthy. Therefore, I think those individuals have enormous responsibility to redistribute that wealth either by creating new businesses or creating new jobs and making sure that money just doesn't lie in a bank account for future generations.

There is simply no other choice than this: either to abstain from interference in the free play of the market, or to delegate the entire management of production and distribution to the government. Either capitalism or socialism: there exists no middle way.

Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.

I think that the future belongs to democracy, but not to capitalism, because they are opposite camps.

There isn't much in the way of pure communist spirit, because the whole nation seems to be engaged in capitalistic enterprises. Much of the country still operates under government control.

The reason socialism has failed around the world every time it's been tried is because people in socialist countries have looked at the United States and have said if they can have it that good, we can. It's a failed, flawed ideology, but if you ask socialists why it's always failed, it's because the United States has stood in the way.

So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.

Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or Communism.

Right now people seem to be very tentative about the positive benefits of capitalism.

From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.

Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.

I'm not a communist, of course. But I do think that everything is down to economics. Capitalism doesn't change.

A Socialist Government cannot carry on a capitalist system better than the capitalists. The men bred by a capitalist system are men of affairs who understand their business. They are not apprentices.

Free enterprise and the market economy mean war; socialism and planned economy mean peace. We must plan civilization or we must perish.

Although capitalism is, in principle, strongly individualistic, it has contributed in practice to reinforce the trend to integration, because it has made our lives more and more interdependent.

What Americans should by now be able to see is that neither the laissez-faire marketplace nor strong government has given them a satisfying or permanent resolution. The problem is not the marketplace and it is not government. The problem originates in the contest of clashing values between society and capitalism and, since this human society cannot surrender its deepest values, it must try to alter capitalism's.

Capitalism with airbags—the type of capitalism I am a fan of.