Noam Chomsky Quotes

It is being common-born that is dangerous, when the great lords play their game of thrones.

The millionaires are a product of natural selection ... the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society.

These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

The prince and the peasant will not be equalized by cutting off the prince's head.

It's very difficult, historically, to define what an elite is. But whatever it is, people are very angry at that idea, I think, not so much because of wealth or privilege as much as attitude that the populous masses, if I could use that overused term, feel that a particular government or cultural group is not subject to the ramifications of their own ideology.

The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

If it were ever allowable to forget what is due to superiority of rank, it would be when the privileged themselves remember it.

Aristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human species.

All people seem to be divided into'ordinary'and 'extraordinary'. The ordinary people must lead a life of strict obedience and have no right to transgress the law because?theyare ordinary.Whereas the extraordinary people have the right to commit any crime they like and transgress the law in any way just because they happen to be extraordinary.

Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.

[Isaiah] Berlin's observation is accurate enough, and applies at home as well, and even more harshly for the reasons already mentioned: the apparatchiks and commissars could at least plead fear in extenuation.

People are fascinated by the rich: Shakespeare wrote plays about kings, not beggars.

The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority.

Spurn not the nobly born with love affected; nor treat with virtuous scorn the well connected.

There is such a thing as caste, even in the West; but it is comparatively faint; it is conservatism here. It says, forsake not your calling, outrage no institution, use no violence, rend no bonds; the State is thy parent. Its virtue or manhood is wholly filial.

One of the tricks of the west is to use or create images, they create images of a person who doesn't go along with their views and then they make certain that this image is distasteful, and then anything that that person has to say from thereon, from thereon in, is rejected.

A weapon you held and didn't know how to use belonged to your enemy.

Privilege, in any society, is the reward of duties performed.

The dons, the bashaws, the grandees, the patricians, the sachems, the nabobs, call them by what names you please, sigh and groan and fret, and sometimes stamp and foam and curse, but all in vain. The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America.

The liberal uses the radical's language to achieve the conservative's aim: the preservation of the capitalist system, and the traditional ethnic/racial hierarchy within society.

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

They, the conservatives, are the real outsides, they tell us, gazing with disgust upon the ludicrous manners of the high and mighty. Or, they tell us, they are rough-and-ready proles, laughing along with us at the efforts of our social "betters" to reform and improve us. That they are often, in fact, people of privilege doing their utmost to boost the fortunes of a political party that is the traditional tool of the privileged is a contradiction that does not trouble them.

The most noticeable weakness of Congressmen is their timidity. They fear the use to be made of their "record." They are afraid ofmaking enemies. They do not vote according to their convictions from fear of consequences.

The aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth.

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