Noam Chomsky Quotes

Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.

Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.

A military government may make a nation great, but it cannot make them free.

The non-democratic governments of petro-states, … use the wealth of at their disposal to resist pressure for more democratic government. In effect, they bribe the people they rule, persuading these citizens to forgo political liberty and the right to decide who governs them.

The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty

If dictatorship is the concentration of power, freedom consists in its diffusion.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.

Those who abhors democracy would rarely immigrate to an authoritarian state if they have to.

When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation - namely, life, liberty and justice for all.

There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.

Having spent all that time getting away from South Africa, running away from the army, I wanted very much to believe that America and England were actually as free as they were meant to be, not slipping rapidly into becoming police states like the one I'd just left.

Having lived through the transition from totalitarianism, I am acutely mindful of the need to never take for granted the basic freedoms of thought, expression and belief that democracy brings.

There is a very long history of oppression in the Arab world, particularly in the states he mentions: Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, as well as in Sudan and Tunisia. These regimes are not based on democracy and their legitimacy comes from military dictatorships or inherited systems. The basic right of an individual to voice his or her opinion is not granted in any kind of form in the Arab world.

Without political freedom there can be no other freedoms, but only an uncertain and uneasy exercise of privileges which may be terminated abruptly without anybody's having to account to those who are affected by these decisions.

There is no such thing as a liberal dictatorship, because a dictator just cannot afford to be liberal.

Whatever may be the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to that safety arising from political freedom.

The People cannot see, but they can feel. The People having felt the difference between a Government of Laws and a Government of Arms, will always desire the Government of Laws, and abhor that of arms.

Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.

Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.

In the United States, we can do almost anything we want. It's not like Egypt, where you're going to get murdered by the security forces.

Our city finds itself in an uncomfortable place: on the frontline between freedom and auto_cracy.

Beyond the barricades we long to see a Hong Kong free from tyranny and a puppet government.