Noam Chomsky Quotes

The more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves.

Although governments will also benefit from improved access to information, increased transparency will allow people at home and abroad to better observe and critique what governments do and to hold leaders accountable for their decisions. As a result, governments will find it harder to adopt strategies that require secrecy or violate international norms.

Remarkably, governments are beginning to embrace the idea that nothing enhances democracy more than giving voice and information to everybody in the country. Why not open their books if they have nothing to hide?

The American people need to know the truth. The American people need to see the truth. In a democracy, letting the people know the truth is the essence of what it means to be free.

We as citizens should hold our government accountable for word and deed.

We are told that during times of crisis we must trust the president. Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on.

You’re doing the people’s business and they have a right to know.

Access to government-held information allows citizens to hold their government accountable for policy decisions and public expenditures…. Access to information bridges the gap between state and society ….

Citizens need to know how their countries are being run so that they can hold governments and big business to account.

Do we have the right to understand the world we live in? The right to all the information regarding why our governments are making the decisions that they are?

As long as the government's actions are secret, it cannot be held accountable. A government for the people and by the people should be transparent to the people.

If it's easy for the government to learn about us, it should be easier for us to learn about the government.

The best type of government comes from a government that is scrutinized by the people when they have true information about our governments, major corporations, other power actors in society.

Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy.

Ever since I arrived in Washington in April 2009, I have been fighting for more transparency and accountability in government.

In a democracy, citizens pass judgment on their government, and if they are kept in the dark about what their government is doing, they cannot be in a position to make well-grounded decisions.

No one in government should ever think that the citizens they work for can't or won't scrutinize their actions.

It shouldn't take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.

We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.

At the dawn of his administration, President Obama opined: 'A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.' Magical rays of white-hot sunlight emanated from his media-manufactured halo. And then bureaucratically engineered darkness settled over the land.

Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what.

Those civil society groups promoting access to information must also require themselves and other activist groups to provide public accounting if, as proponents of openness, they are to safeguard their own legitimacy and credibility…

The overarching purpose of access to information legislation … is to facilitate democracy. It does so in two related ways. It helps to ensure first, that citizens have the information required to participate meaningfully in the democratic process, and secondly, that politicians and bureaucrats remain accountable to the citizenry.

It's a difficult thing today to be informed about our government even without all the secrecy.

How much we all suffer from lack of oversight from the government.