Noam Chomsky Democracy Quotations

Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination,' we might say - exercised through the mass media.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

So yes in theory there is a kind of a formal democracy and in many ways these were achievements and an improvement over the feudal system and more advanced than anything else in the world, but nothing that we ought to call democracy.

The 'corporatization of America' during the past century [has been] an attack on democracy.

...dissent, protest, presures of a wide variety that escape elite control can modify the calculus of costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that Washington can be compelled to permit at least some steps towards "justice, freedom and democracy" within its domains.

Democracy is a danger to any powerful group.

The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies.

Anarcho-syndic alism took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society.

Bolivia is a striking example. The mostly white, Europeanized elite, which is a minority, happens to be sitting on most of the hydrocarbon reserves. For the first time Bolivia is becoming democratic. So it's therefore bitterly hated by the West, which despises democracy, because it's much too dangerous.

...as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.

Julian Assange shouldn't be the subject of a grand jury hearing, he should be given a medal. He's contributing to democracy.

Democracy, in the United States rhetoric refers to a system of governance in which elite elements based in the business community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society, while the population observes quietly. So understood, democracy is a system of elite decision and public ratification, as in the United States itself. Correspondingly, popular involvement in the formation of public policy is considered a serious threat. It is not a step towards democracy; rather it constitutes a 'crisis of democracy' that must be overcome.

Even Stalin proclaimed his love for democracy. We do not learn about the nature of systems of power by listening to their rhetoric.

[James] Madison pointed out in the discussion of the constitutional debates - the constitutional convention - that democracy would be a danger. He used England of course as the model and said suppose that in England everyone had the free right to vote; the poor, the propertyless - who are the great majority - would use their voting power to take away the rights of property owners to carry out what we would call land reform.

One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.

The best defense against democracy is to distract people.

Under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control.

Because they don't teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.

You can’t have meaningful political democracy without functioning economic democracy.

Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive.

There isn't much point arguing about the word "libertarian." It would make about as much sense to argue with an unreconstructed Stalinist about the word "democracy" - recall that they called what they'd constructed "peoples' democracies." The weird offshoot of ultra-right individualist anarchism that is called "libertarian" here happens to amount to advocacy of perhaps the worst kind of imaginable tyranny, namely unaccountable private tyranny. If they want to call that "libertarian," fine; after all, Stalin called his system "democratic." But why bother arguing about it?

Stock ownership in the US is very highly concentrated. [Shareholder actions are] something, but it's like the old Communist Party in the USSR, it would be nice to see more protest inside the Communist Party but it's not democracy. It's not going to happen. [Shareholder actions] are a good step, but they're mostly symbolic.

One of the most interesting reactions to come out of 1968 was in the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which believed there was a 'crisis of democracy' from too much participation of the masses.

The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.

The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided . . . democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured; they may well be essential to survival.