Noam Chomsky Quotes

Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.

The New Deal's enmity for that system of free and competitive private enterprise which we call capitalism was fundamental.

Under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another.

In America, we debate everything except capitalism. If there is an institution in your society that is above criticism, you’re giving it a free pass.

I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party... the poor and middle class.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

Laissez Faire was very good sauce for the goose, labor, but was very poor sauce for the gander, capital.

The system has for its object an increase of persons that are to intervene between the producer and the consumer, living on the product of the land and labour of others, diminishing the power of the first, and increasing the number of the last.

If you've got unemployment, low pay, that was just too bad. But that was the system. That was the sort of economy and philosophy against which I was fighting in the 1930s.

It is impossible for capitalists and laborers to have common interests.

There is a real fear around shifting from our existing economic system because people believe it gives us social organisation, a sense of freedom, and the ability to be nice to each other. Growth is seen as a social lubricant that allows us to be socially responsible.

The capitalist class shoots down mothers and children. It stops at nothing, no matter how monstrous, to prevent the organization of the workers.

A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

If work were good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor.

In Russia bureaucracy as the ruling class is master of production and produce, and the Russian workers are an exploited class.

With the coming of peace, the workers are no longer needed as soldiers; they are no longer comrades, defenders of the fatherland, heroes. Once more they become beasts of burden, objects of exploitation.

If experts were usually right, socialism would prevail.

Labor is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital…. The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.

Individualism and Socialism

In the United States you have socialism for the rich and free markets for the poor.

I am not given to Political Economy, but I can use my eyes. I have never seen the masters (mill owners) getting thin and haggard for want of food

As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism. These “humanitarian parts” are only trimming the poodle. Socialism, one and inseparable with its “antirent and anticapital parts,” means to get rid of the poodle..