Noam Chomsky Quotes

The messenger matters. When people of modest means complain about inequality, it usually gets written off as class warfare, but when billionaires complain, the problem is redefined.

We cannot rebuild the American Dream here at home by catering to the voices of the privileged and powerful.

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

Those who suffer are not those at the top, but are the less privileged members of society.

The Privileged and the People form Two Nations.

Poor men's words have little weight.

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

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

When conservatives talk about opportunity, they mean opportunities for the rich to get richer, for the powerful to get more powerful.

Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.

Though the rich of this earth find no difficulty in creating misery, they can't bear to see it.

The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram "a rising of the rich against the poor."

So long as there are nobles and commoners, the wealthy and the poor, those with power will be heard, and those without ignored. That's the world.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

We often hear a lot about subsidies, because it's often the powerful talking about the poor; the poor don't have enough voice to question the privileges.

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.

For the Sanders supporters, there's a thought that the people who are well off are doing really great, and the system is systematically unfair, and that's a very deeply felt and serious objection to the current situation.

The history of the world is the history of the privileged few.

If one class of society is obliged, in order to live, to take any price for its services, while another can abstain from such action thanks to resources at its disposal which, however, are not necessarily due to any social superiority, the second has an unjust advantage over the first at law. In other words, there cannot be rich and poor a birth without there being unjust contracts.

Bashing the elite is what I'm all about in my music because they absolutely don't deserve the privileged position that they're in, and we're seeing this around the globe right now.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.