Noam Chomsky Quotes

What until then seemed impossible to achieve has become a fact of life. We have won the right to association in trade unions independent from the authorities, founded and shaped by the working people themselves.

Politics didn't lead me to working people. Working people led me into politics.

I want the Brahmins to realize that the Dravidian people today are very much hating those who cunningly cheated them with absurdities. They are now aware of the particular community making a living by spreading the foolishness. People have begun to hate god, religion, caste, mythologies (puranas) and so on.

Throughout my life, I've seen the difference that volunteering efforts can make in people's lives. I know the personal value of service as a local volunteer.

Love IS the People's Power

I hope people become inspired to become active in their community. That's the important thing.

There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don't mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that's the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.

I went to Seattle as just another geek in the food chain, thinking, "Well, in my own puny little way, I'd rather be a part of history than just sit and watch it on TV." So, the fact that so many people are starting to ask the right questions and rack their brains for solutions does give me hope.

Every night I get many letters, and after every talk I get many questions from people who say, "I want to change things. What can I do?" I never hear these questions from peasants in southern Colombia or Kurds in southeastern Turkey under miserable repression or anybody who is suffering. They don't ask what they can do; they tell you what they're doing.

You can't expect people who didn't exist as a community at all until about twenty years ago to have formed a political movement. This attack on the LGBT community was very shocking to the people who consider themselves to be activists. They're basically playing in the sandbox, and there's a tank coming! And what are they supposed to do - use the plastic shovel to push the tank back? But since the homosexual propaganda legislation, people have really stepped up, educated themselves politically, and grown by leaps and bounds.

But a people unable to reform will not be able to preserve its old culture either.

For me the music community was always like a model for what could be. The way people would play together, just harmony and being - old guys and young guys, black guys and white guys. It was setting an example for what the rest of us could be.

People ask me a lot, 'what can one person do,' and I say 'I'm not really sure what one person can due except come together with other people.'

I had too many businesses that are frivolous. I have enough. What interests me most is under-served communities. We need a new style of empowering these people, and new approaches.

Of course, we have leaders in the African American community as well that we've all worked with. One of the great rewards of being an activist is that you get to meet all these wonderful people. And there are many unsung heroes. There are so many out there that are good people that are working hard.

Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people. . . . There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.

There is message to the community that a non-governmental process is underway to bring about social change, it's a public one, and people like Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, and Mikhail Gorbachev are throwing their weight behind it. In a world where there's a lot of cynicism and despair, this has a candle-lighting effect.

I see people whose spirits are not broken, who continue to work for justice. That makes me feel alive, when I witness their work, and then I witness some of their dreams come to fruition.

I think something happens only when people find that they are moved with others, find themselves linked or allied in new ways, showing up or speaking out in ways that resonate with one another. That resonating can be very compelling and lead to moving and speaking more emphatically and with sharper focus.

Most conservatives just want to turn back the clock to a time before the income tax - 100 years or so. I would like to turn the clock back thousands of years to a time when people lived in small communities and took care of each other.

I think it's terribly important that networks of anarchists establish themselves with a view toward educating people.

Whenever a people are bound together in loyalty to a story that includes something as strange as the Sermon on the Mount, we are put at odds with the world.

All over this country you have progressive communities like Madison and Burlington, but we've got to go well, well, well outside of those communities. We've got to go to the rural areas. We've got to go where a lot of working people are voting Republican.

Poverty without a people's government looks like hopelessness, but to see poverty in organized communities is to see relief-in-progress.