Robert McChesney Quotes

The nature of the Internet and the importance of net neutrality is that innovation can come from everyone.

Huge institutions producing costly services dominate the horizons of our inventiveness.

Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.

Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.

For most of the world, civil and political rights... come as luxuries that are far away in the future.

As time goes on we get closer to that American Dream of there being a pie cut up and shared. Usually greed and selfishness prevent that and there is always one bad apple in every barrel.

It is not inevitable that the Internet will evolve in a manner compatible with democracy.

We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt.

If you get so unequal that people believe they don't have a chance, that the field isn't level for them and their children, that puts democracy at risk.

The real threat to the democracy is the half a nation in poverty.

Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type?

Median compensation in America has been stagnant over 25 of the last 30 years, the only exceptions being the last 5 years of the 1990s.

We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.

Hirelings of monopoly

Democracy and capitalism have both been hacked.

We’re going to use the Internet to keep up with our friends and let them know what we are doing. They’re going to use it to decide what kind of government they’re going to have.

The rich are hijacking American democracy.

From day one, the Internet was a public square, and the providers merely connected everyone, rather than regulating who spoke with whom. That allowed the Internet to evolve into a form of basic infrastructure, used by over a billion people today.

Liberty is impossible if 36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.

Republicans want to keep the open Internet safe from big government. Democrats want to keep it safe from big corporations. I say we agree to agree and move ahead.

Globalization and trade liberalization were supposed to make us all better off through the mechanism of trickle-down economics. What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics, as we moved ever closer to a system of 'one dollar, one vote' as opposed to 'one person, one vote.'

Evidence and economic theory suggests that control of the Internet by the phone and cable companies would lead to blocking of competing technologies.

I was really interested in the way in which poverty and economic stagnation were transforming and corrupting the American narrative.

Even though the Internet touches every part of our lives, one person is to blame for potentially destroying its potential for innovation and freedom of expression: former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

India lived in hopelessness, as the government was not responsive. It did not know what the poor needed. There was complete policy paralysis. Corruption was rampant, and terrorists used to play havoc in the country.