Chomsky Anarchism Quotes & Sayings

Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad. — Mark Twain

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. — Noam Chomsky

Anarchism means all sort of things to different people, but the traditional anarchists' movements assumed that there'd be a highly organized society, just one organized from below with direct participation and so on. — Noam Chomsky

Bike. Got the old girl out of — Marie Force

So understood, anarchism is the inheritor of the classical liberal ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment. It is part of a broader range of libertarian socialist thought and action that ranges from the left anti-Bolshevik Marxism of Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Paul Mattick, and others, to the anarcho-syndicalism that crucially includes the practical achievements of revolutionary Spain in 1936, reaching further to worker-owned enterprises spreading today in the Rust Belt of the United States, in northern Mexico, in Egypt, and in many other countries, most extensively in the Basque country in Spain, also encompassing the many cooperative movements around the world and a good part of feminist and civil and human rights initiatives. — Noam Chomsky

Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they're told. And privelage and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on. — Noam Chomsky

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? — Noam Chomsky

We can wash the skin of our bodies with a bath, but through asana practice we not only purify our blood and cells, we are cleansing the inner body as we practice. — B.K.S. Iyengar

I made The Instigator while I was homeless as a result of 9/11, and there was some stuff on there that was really raw and directly out of that experience — Rhett Miller

He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall. — Michael Ondaatje

When you go to see the lake, you also see the hippos. — William Kamkwamba

If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself. — Mikhail Bakunin

Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past ad the already dead future.

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) — Tom McDonough

Anarchism, in my view, is an expression of the idea that the burden of proof is always on those who argue that authority and domination are necessary. They have to demonstrate, with powerful argument, that that conclusion is correct. If they cannot, then the institutions they defend should be considered illegitimate. How one should react to illegitimate authority depends on circumstances and conditions: there are no formulas. — Noam Chomsky

The word 'comedy' implies slapstick. — Ridley Scott

The communists may not have done very well in the end, but I can't help thinking of capitalism as merely the go-to religion of the greedy and selfish. — Pansy Schneider-Horst

Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living. — Thomas Browne

I'm obsessed with shoes. I must have hundreds of pairs ... That reminds me- I need to go shopping! — Keira Knightley