Noam Chomsky Quotes

If you look at Charles Dickens's time, there were so many different levels of society and everybody understood their place in it, it was that complex and simple. I'm not sure we have that now.

Class - or the economic status of individuals - is evident in all societies, some very well stratified by a rigid caste system determined by birth.

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.

Of course the lower classes have always felt downtrodden and aspired to a better life. But there is this theory that people respond to a class structure in England - there was a time when people knew who they were and knew whom they served and as long as management wasn't abusive, it was a good life for people.

It has often been said, that there is but one rank of men in America… we have no artificial distinctions of men into noblemen and commoners among us, but it ought to be remarked, that superior degrees of industry and capacity, and above all, commerce, have introduced inequality of property among us, and these have introduced natural distinctions of rank in Pennsylvania, as certain and general as the artificial distinctions of men in Europe. This will ever be the case while commerce exists in this country.

The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate, / God made them high or lowly. / And ordered their estate.

The division of society into estates or castes means in effect that conceptually and organizationally these ‘natural’ forms are established without their economic basis ever becoming conscious

The stability of medieval society depended on the fixity of all of its parts, as that of modern society is on their mobility.

The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs;

You go to Europe, and they have their very wealthy elites, and then everybody else is, you know, a couple of steps above a peasant, basically.

What I see happening to this country is a neo-caste system.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

In England, the class system is about a thousand years old, and it's not going to change any time soon.

In what purports to be an egalitarian society, the existence of class is the secret about which no one speaks.

My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment - I agree with Nietzsche about this - a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them.

The caste system may be more highly developed in countries like India or England, but every tier of society in almost every culture tries to dominate a group it perceives as beneath it.

The concept of a 'job' is pretty recent. If you go back a few hundred years, everyone was either a slave or a serf, or living off slave or serf labor to pursue science or philosophy or art.

There's this idea of America that some people have to win and some have to lose, so certain things are in place to make this happen. Some people have to be the next legislators and political elites, and some have to fill the prisons and work in McDonald's. That's how America works. It's a machine which needs people up top and people down low.

In Moscow, if you have money, you're king. If you don't - sorry, man, get lost. I mean, it's like this everywhere. But in Moscow, it's much more hard-core.

Class is really interesting to me, maybe because I'm from England where there is a pretty hideous, deep-rooted obsession with class. I don't like the obsession with class, but it certainly interests me.

We have a myth of the classless society. You won't hear an American politician apart from Bernie Sanders talk about the working class. We are all middle class, apparently.

For the Anglo-Saxons, food determined a person's position in society.

Increasingly, we're seeing two worlds in Canada. The world for most Canadians is increasingly unaffordable, involves more precarious work, and is a harder place in which to get by. The second world is an exclusive club for the wealthy and well-connected who get special access and are exempt from rules the rest of us play by.

Capitalism in and of itself is based on the monetising of human labour, and the first evidence of that is slavery. And that has never changed. We are all participating in that.

The society of Christendom and especially of Western Christendom up to the explosion, which we call the Reformation, had been a society of owners: a Proprietarial Society. It was one in which there remained strong bonds between one class and another, and in which there was a hierarchy of superior and inferior, but not, in the main, a distinction between a restricted body of possessors and a main body of destitute at the mercy of the possessors, such as our society has become.