Noam Chomsky Quotes

I learned the power of storytelling and the responsibility that people with influence have to speak out

The term "intellectual" is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility.

You can't run a society or cope with its problems if people are not held accountable for what they do.

Modern man is weighed down more by the burden of responsibility than by the burden of sin. We think him more a savior who shoulders our responsibilities than him who shoulders our sins. If instead of making decisions we have but to obey and do our duty, we feel it as a sort of salvation.

Men will be held accountable for the things which they have and not for the things they have not. ... All the light and intelligence communicated to them from their beneficent creator, whether it is much or little, by the same they in justice will be judged, and ... they are required to yield obedience and improve upon that and that only which is given, for man is not to live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

Great power involves great responsibility

In order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment.

Power always brings with it responsibility.

A man should not play the coward to his deeds. He should not repudiate them once he has performed them. Pangs of conscience are indecent.

The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.

My overall responsibility is to be truthful. If people pay money to come and see me, looking for something other than that, then they've made a mistake.

If the victims are my problem, the killers are yours.

Each individual in fact has moral responsibility for the acts which he personally performs; no one can be exempted from this responsibility, and on the basis of it everyone will be judged by God himself.

Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent.

If you have the ability to do something, you should do it.

It is a privilege to serve people, a privilege that must be earned, and once earned, there is an obligation to do something good with it.

Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?

Responsibility is the price every man must pay for freedom.

"Am I my brother's keeper?" There you have the whole Biblical understanding that you are your brother's keeper. You also have a whole other understanding in which you are not your brother's keeper. And I've heard some extremely bright people take this position.

Only individuals have a sense of responsibility.

If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.

A weakened sense of responsibility does not weaken the fact of responsibility.

People who won't help others in trouble "because they got into trouble through their own fault" would probably not throw a lifeline to a drowning person until they learned whether that person fell in through his or her own fault or not.

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.

You are responsible for what you have done and the people whom you have influenced.