Occupy Quotes

“..reading a book doesn’t mean just turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy

“It's not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures- it's inevitable. But unless the process that is taking place here and elsewhere in the country and around the world, unless that continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy

“It's easy to think of things that need to be done, but they all have a prerequisite, namely, a mass popular base that is committed to implementing it.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy

“Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“The health care system in the United States, I’m sure you know, is a total international scandal. It’s twice the per capita cost of comparable countries and one of the worst outcomes, with a huge number of people uninsured altogether. And it’s going to get worse.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“During the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Eastern Massachusetts, mid-nineteenth century, there happened to be a very lively press run by working people, young women in the factories, artisans in the mills, and so on. They had their own press that was very interesting, very widely read and had a lot of support. And they bitterly condemned the way the industrial system was taking away their freedom and liberty and imposing on them rigid hierarchical structures that they didn’t want. One of their main complaints was what they called “the new spirit of the age: gain wealth forgetting all but self.” For 150 years there have been massive efforts to try to impose “the new spirit of the age” on people. But it’s so inhuman that there’s a lot of resistance, and it continues.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“In the U.S. Constitution there was a category of creatures called three-fifth humans—the enslaved population. They weren’t considered persons. And in fact women were barely considered persons, so they didn’t have rights.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“but unless Western populations can rise to the level of Egyptians they’re going to remain victims.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“For the majority, real incomes have pretty much stagnated, sometimes declined. Benefits have also declined and work hours have gone up, and so on. It’s not Third World misery, but it’s not what it ought to be in a rich society, the richest in the world, in fact, with plenty of wealth around, which people can see, just not in their pockets.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“There are various kinds of propaganda systems. There’s the kind that they had in Russia in the old days, which was overt. The government said, here’s what you are supposed to believe. Okay, so maybe people would accept it, maybe not, but they had no doubt as to where it was coming from. A sophisticated propaganda system won’t do that. It won’t state the doctrines you are supposed to believe. It will just presuppose them, so they become like the air you breathe. That’s the basis for discussion. Then we have debate within those limits.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“Congress right now is dismantling legislation instituted by Richard Nixon—really the last liberal president of the U.S., literally, and that shows you what’s been going on. They’re dismantling the limited measures of the Nixon administration to try to do something about what is a growing, emerging catastrophe. And this is connected with a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?” And we’re really regressing back to the medieval period. It’s not a joke.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“How likely is it that the ruling class in America could develop an openly fascist system here? I think it’s very unlikely, frankly. They don’t have the force. About a century ago, in the freest countries in the world at that time—Britain and the United States—the dominant classes came to understand that they can’t control the population by force any longer. Too much freedom had been won by struggles like these. They realized this, they were self-conscious about it, and it’s discussed in their literature. The dominant class recognized they had to shift their tactics to control of attitudes and beliefs instead of just the cudgel. They didn’t throw away the cudgel, but it can’t do what it used to do. You have to control attitudes and beliefs. In fact, that’s when the public relations industry began. It began in the United States and England, the free countries where you had to have a major industry to control beliefs and attitudes; to induce consumerism, passivity, apathy, distraction—all the things you know very well. And that’s the way it’s been going on. It’s a barrier, but it’s a lot easier to overcome than torture and the Gestapo. I don’t think the circumstances exist any longer for instituting anything like what we called fascism.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“Take a look at the polls. The public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply in this period of stagnation and decline—higher taxes on the wealthy and preserve the limited social benefits.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“The population is angry, frustrated, bitter—and for good reasons. For the past generation, policies have been initiated that have led to an extremely sharp concentration of wealth in a tiny sector of the population. In fact, the wealth distribution is very heavily weighted by, literally, the top tenth of one percent of the population, a fraction so small that they’re not even picked up on the census. You have to do statistical analysis just to detect them. And they have benefited enormously. This is mostly from the financial sector—hedge fund managers, CEOs of financial corporations, and so on.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“Occupy is really the first sustained response to this. People have referred to the Tea Party as a response, but that is highly misleading. The Tea Party is relatively affluent, white. Its influence and power come from the fact that it has enormous corporate support and heavy finance. Parts of the corporate world simply see them as their shock troops, but it’s not a movement in the serious sense that Occupy is.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies, tax changes, also rules of corporate governance, and deregulation. Alongside of this began the very sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drives the political parties even deeper than before into the pockets of the corporate sector. The parties dissolved, essentially, in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair or some position of responsibility, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector, increasingly the financial sector.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“THERE’S ALWAYS A CLASS WAR GOING ON”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“Over the following years, the concept of “person” was changed by the courts in two ways. One way was to broaden it to include corporations, legal fictions established and sustained by the state. In fact, these “persons” later became the management of corporations, according to the court decisions. So the management of corporations became “persons.” It was also narrowed to exclude undocumented immigrants. They had to be excluded from the category of “persons.” And that’s happening right now. So the legislations that you’re talking about, they go two ways. They broaden the category of persons to include corporate entities, which now have rights way beyond human beings, given by the trade agreements and others, and they exclude the people who flee from Central America where the U.S. devastated their homelands, and flee from Mexico because they can’t compete with the highly-subsidized U.S. agribusiness.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity

“As far as money and politics are concerned, it’s hard to beat the comment of the great political financier, Mark Hanna. About a century ago, he was asked what was important in politics. He answered, “The first is money, the second one is money and I’ve forgotten what the third one is.”
― Noam Chomsky, Occupy