Noam Chomsky Quotes

What it takes just to earn a living - working two or three jobs - is driving a wedge in families that shouldn't be there.

At the beginning, I really wanted to be home with my kid. I was a product of my generation. But in the suburbs, you are very isolated, really alone.

Raising a family is difficult enough. But it's even more difficult for single parents struggling to make ends meet. They don't need more obstacles. They need more opportunities.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

With social distancing restrictions in place, many are finding themselves isolated from their support networks and suddenly navigating parenthood differently than they expected.

With stagnant hourly wages, the only way for working families to get ahead is by working more hours, ... certainly not the path to improving living standards that we'd expect in an economy posting strong productivity gains.

The beautiful people in the magazines, got the normal ones living beyond their means.

I know that family life in America is a minefield, an economic trap for women, a study in disappointment for both sexes.

If Bill Gates woke up with Oprah's money he'd jump out the window.

Being a working mother means that you are always disappointing somebody.

When I confess a couple who have kids, a married couple, I ask, 'how many children do you have?' Some get worried and think the priest will ask why I don't have more. I would make a second question, 'Do you play with your children?' The majority say, 'but father, I have no time. I work all day.'

Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.

The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.

If you haven't already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus.

Now I understand why people do drugs, why people drink, and why people go crazy. As the success level goes up and up and up, the further detached I get from everybody else. Luckily, with my girlfriend, everything is gravy because I brought her into it. I brought her in and she's very hands on with my career.

If I worked in my apartment, I'd never leave my apartment.

Billy was fascinated by the television. At its most basic level, it occupied his time and shut out the demons of isolation. This was another irony because, for so long, he had shunned the tube for a similar purpose-to prevent it from bombarding his brain with demons of banality. However, each time he turned the machine on, he began to discover a world of assorted delights, as well as gain insight into the insidious manner in which this medium was shaping the mass psyche. If nothing else, he learned there was nothing innocuous about it.

Every working mom I know is constantly walking some kind of a tightrope of guilt.

I think the busiest people are often the loneliest.

For far too many people in the world, the vicious cycle of financial deprivation also feeds into the vicious cycle of sleep deprivation. If you're working two or three jobs and struggling to make ends meet, "get more sleep" is probably not going to be near the top of your priorities list.

The role of television is the illusion of company, noise. I call it the fifth wall and the second window: the window of illusion.

TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

We're now in one of those periods when the reality of intense pressure on the middle class diverges from long-held assumptions of how the American bargain should work

Television, I'm afraid, has isolated us more than race, class, or ethnicity.

You can have somebody living next door to you and you can live in a completely different world from that person, which is definitely something we've never experienced before. So I think just because of the media landscape and the way we get our information now, we're more atomized and isolated from each other than ever before.