Noam Chomsky Quotes

Some laws are wrong, and we have an obligation to speak out against those laws wherever they are.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

Repression or oppression never yet succeeded in crushing the truth or redressing a wrong.

We should be artistic in causing harm to them [dissidents.]

Violence, indeed, is the child of suppression.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

As long as the superstition that people should obey unjust laws exists, so long will slavery exist

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to combat.

Any act of violence creates resentment and resistance, because humans were meant to be free.

It is better to protest than to accept injustice.

You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.

They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

They will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal.

You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

They claim that I'm violent just cuz I refuse to be silent.

You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.

The point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.

Where all your rights become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours...then surely it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.

Racism doesn't know color, death doesn't know age, and pain doesn't know might.

I'm not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody's boot on my neck.

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

We need more radicalism among us before we can speak as becomes a suffering, oppressed, and persecuted people.

When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.

If we had to kneel in order to live in peace, [ U.S. government] will have to kill us before.