Noam Chomsky Quotes

'Community,' that loaded word so beloved of politicians, is simply not a reality in most people's lives. It's normal for us to be cut off from each other.

There are several factors in modern society that contribute to loneliness. One is that we are more mobile than we have been in decades past, which is fantastic in many respects, but also leads to us to move away from communities that we grew up with and got to know over time.

It's strange, because it seems that society is kind of promoting or nurturing this kind of ostracized existence. People are kind of very much in their own little worlds.

Most people are on the world, not in it-- having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them-- undiffused seporate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but seporate.

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.

There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.

We live in a time where there's an alienation factor. There's a certain disconnection. We don't have any real sense of community anymore.

Individualism, one of the great achievements of Western civilization, is now accompanied more and more by such phenomena as fragmentation, solitude, egocentricity and the disintegration of solidarity

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true.

When I was in Paris I was at a big club in a major city, but nobody really cared about each other. It didn't have that family feeling, I didn't see any team spirit.

We live in such an isolating time with technology and social media and I think that creates this feeling of having to connect, of having so many ways to connect but nothing's connecting.

Coming out of college, back to New York, where I didn't really know that many people, I thought our world was very atomized.

When I was young as a teenager, that was the biggest mystery in the world to me: Why don't people connect?

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Everyone is so obsessed with themselves nowadays that they have no time for me.

There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.