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You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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East Oak Lane
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Avram Noam Chomsky
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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If you look at say, England and Germany a century ago, which had the most advanced navies then, they were dealing with extremely tricky technological problems. Putting a huge gun on a moving platform and ensuring that it could hit another moving target was one of the hardest technical problems of the early twentieth century.
Noam Chomsky
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If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
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What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.
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The United States is absolutely the most dangerous country in the world.
Noam Chomsky
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I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.
Noam Chomsky
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The two countries [Pakistan and India] have already come close to nuclear confrontation twice and this could get worse. So dealing with the relationship with India is extremely important.
Noam Chomsky
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We have a record for Nawaz Sharif but not the others. And judging by the record, it's pretty hard to be optimistic. His [Sharif's] previous governments were very corrupt and regressive in the policies pursued.
Noam Chomsky
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The basic principle is that the losers have to confess, not the victors. When they do it, it's a crime. When we do it, it's not. And more generally, it's the defeated who are tried, not the victors.
Noam Chomsky
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My position is that we should not succumb to irrational belief.
Noam Chomsky
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In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers but not against the United States.
Noam Chomsky
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I do not see how we can rationally oppose high speed rail because of the environmental and other costs without considering the social and human consequences of the radical elimination of transportation that this entails.
Noam Chomsky
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When I look at public opinion, I'm not far out of the mainstream. I'm in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I've ever said.
Noam Chomsky
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My linguistics is pretty theoretical.
Noam Chomsky
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Obama's latest line is that he didn't establish a red line but the world did through its conventions on chemical warfare.
Noam Chomsky
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There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them
Noam Chomsky
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My memory - faded, as I say - is that Paul Johnson was trying to vilify all intellectuals who were at all critical of the states he worships, and of power generally (except, of course, the power of enemies, which we must denounce, imitating the commissars who are his models, though he doesn't understand it).
Noam Chomsky
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Similar problems are arising in Egypt too. The question is whether the military will release its grip which has been extremely strong for the past 60 years. So this is happening all over the region and particularly strikingly in Pakistan.
Noam Chomsky
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The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.
Noam Chomsky
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Should people be mere interested spectators of action, not participants, restricted to lending their weight periodically to one or another sector of the responsible men, as advocates of manufacture of consent have recommended? Or should their rights transcend these highly restricted bounds?
Noam Chomsky
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If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of control, then your world's gone. Like some unusual child who has a million toys and one of them is stolen, he's going to perish.
Noam Chomsky