Noam Chomsky Quotes

Socialism holds nothing but unhappiness for the human race. It destroys personal initiative, wipes out national pride ... and plays into the hands of the autocrats.... Socialism is the end of fanatics, the sophistry of so-called intelligentsia, and it has no place in the hearts of those who would secure and fight for freedom and preserve democracy.

The difference between being out of step with a dictator and being out of step with the democratic majority is practically negligible. The important thing is to be in step.

If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and . . . try freedom.

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

Freedom for the government is enslavement for the people. When the government is free the people are enslaved. When the government is contained then the people are free.

The minimum that most minimalists want leaves in place just the institutions who protect their interests. That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

What stands if freedom fall?

Democracy is the suggestion box for slaves.

Democracy is the opposite of totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or mobocracy.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

I've been on the left of the Party since I joined it about 1934 and I haven't seen much reason for altering... I have always been a strong libertarian both inside the Labour Party and outside... what I want to seek to do over a period of course is to establish a Socialist society.

Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence.

There is a reason for the affected profession of " anarchist sympathies" among Tories and grandees, and of " libertarian principles" by Hobbesian yahoos of the right. Among the former, one sees the upholding of the view that a gentleman's business and property are his own, and none of the government's. Among the latter, a distaste for democracy, for taxation, and for the need to consult others about the planet.

If a nation wishes, it can have both free elections and slavery.

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.

In constitutional states, liberty is compensation for heavy taxes; in dictatorships, the subsititue is light taxes.

If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.

It is democracy I am really suffering from as much as I am suffering from the opposition.

How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: "your will must disappear and mine prevail!"-how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?

Liberty has not only enemies which it conquers, but perfidious friends, who rob the fruits of its victories: Absolute democracy, socialism.

Fascism isn't a libertarian doctrine! It just isn't, never will be and it can't be cast as one.

The State is, and always has been, the great single enemy of the human race, its liberty, happiness, and progress.

Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, and among youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice.... My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear.

Formerly, when a king died at Versailles the reign of his successor was immediately announced by the cry: "The king is dead, long live the king", in order to make it understood that despotism is immortal! Now an entire people, moved by a sublime instinct, cried: Long live the Republic! to teach the universe that tyranny died with the tyrant.

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.