Noam Chomsky Quotes

Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.

Whenever the very rich hold views at odds with those of the entire population, the federal government tends to do the rich's bidding.

In large commercial cities, the money power is, I fear irresistible. It is not by open corruption that it always, or even most generally, operates.

I am not content to entrust our free-speech rights to the good graces and whims of Congress and hope that politicians don't abuse their power.

We have had a continuing problem of the equality of wealth and the power that goes with it. There are other ways of curtailing the power of corporations…. Congress is at fault for not requiring full disclosure of political contributions… Speech is the last thing we should be curtailing.

I feel strongly that the Supreme Court needs to stand on the side of the American people, not on the side of the powerful corporations and the wealthy.

Supreme Court opinion notwithstanding, corporations are not defined as people under the Constitution, and free speech can hardly be called free when only the rich are heard.

Rent-control laws disproportionately benefit the non-poor because the elite pull strings, work the system and are better connected than the non-poor.

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.

People don't want to have to justify their privileges; they don't want to have to justify having access to the power and resource that wealth brings. And by not talking about it, they are able to hold onto their power without being questioned, and I think that makes them feel more secure.

If you really want to show power in its larger aspects, you need to show the effects on the powerless, for good or ill - the human cost of public works. That's what I try to do, show not only how power works but its effect on people.

I am furious at the way that we have allowed money to subvert our democracy. I am appalled at the way that the U.S., a very wealthy nation, permits and even encourages a level of poverty that other wealthy nations would not even consider.

Political battles are won when the rich favor them.

It's wherever business rules, business is going to get the politicians they want because they control the money and money controls the power.

Wall Street, the banks, and corporate America, has been able to call the shots here. They control our members of Congress and they get what they want.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are shining a national spotlight on the most powerful, dangerous and secretive economic and political force in America.

Rich people march on Washington every day.

The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest "functionaire" possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose desecration it depends whether and how I am allowed to live or to work.

How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.

The newspapers of your country seem to be more powerful than the government.

I fear that the court has done what the trusts wanted it to do and what Congress has steadily refused to do.

The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, no worse, for a people than another.

Water does tend to flow up hill toward money and power.

Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.

There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.