Noam Chomsky Quotes

Everybody wants to talk about black and white, when the situation is really about rich people against poor people.

The GOP/corporate right-wing, it seems, never really considers the consequences of their actions.

Our greatest political disease -- the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?

Elites always tell poor people, “Work hard and play by the rules.”

A poor man is a man who has not got much money. This may seem a simple and unnecessary description, but in the face of a great mass of modern fact and fiction, it seems very necessary indeed; most of our realists and sociologists talk about a poor man as if he were an octopus or an alligator.

The struggle, begun this morning upon the hustings of your old town, is not a struggle between two men—it is a struggle between two countries. On the one side, the side of the Whig candidate, hangs the red banner beneath which your senate has been sacked, your commerce has been wrecked, your nobility has been dishonored, your peasants have been starved. On the other side … floats the green flag beneath which your senate sat, your commerce thrived, your nobility honored, your peasants prospered.

This contempt for money is a trick developed by the rich to keep the poor without it.

The United States economy is like a poker game where the chips have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and where the other fellows can stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit runs out the game will stop.

Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power -- therefore you have too much responsibility -- and you're a kind of dictator.

All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.

Our leaders pay lip service to the freedoms that democracy provides while actually supporting an economic structure that imprisons its citizens under more and more debt.

I don't feel an obligation to go by the rankings - we all know how those rankings are produced anyway. I want to go out there and fight the money fight.

The problem is that people basically dangle debt in front of us. And the cost for the poor of course is much higher than for the wealthy.

Economic inequality is a corrosive force that undermines economic growth, puts a brake on the fight against poverty, and sparks social unrest.

In India, the concentration of wealth is in a few hands.

Just because footballers earn a lot of money, it doesn't mean we're not human.

I did not have a car in high school and neither did Angelina. Try to imagine. You go to Beverly Hills High, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. Even the cheapest car that anyone has is brand new. All my friends are well off. I have a movie-star father and no car. It was debilitating.

The concentration of U.S. income and wealth in the hands of the very rich is a new development in my lifetime.

It's really difficult for mainstream - let's say, cable outlets - to talk about things like income inequality, wealth inequality when the advertisers that are funding their shows are the same corporations that want to ensure that the same system continues.

We live in a very classist society, and it's sad and depressing.

You need money to have advocacy in America. People that don't have money don't have advocacy.

The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality.

'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'

For whatever reason, in this country we have a very interesting relationship with poverty, where we think people in poverty are bad people.

Inequality is partly a marker of success.