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To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
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Human Rights Activist
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Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
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Anyone in a position to overcome barriers to free thought and communication should do so.
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The anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.
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Julian Assange shouldn't be the subject of a grand jury hearing, he should be given a medal. He's contributing to democracy.
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My feeling is that the Supreme Court reached a reasonable standard of protection of speech in the 1960s, a standard higher than any other country in the world, to my knowledge. In brief, speech should be protected up to participation in imminent criminal action.
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Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull.
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[Barack] Obama was reaching a point [with Syria bombing] where he might not have been able to carry it off.He was losing support internally, and was compelled to send the vote to Congress, and it looked as if he was going to be defeated, which would have been a very serious blow to his presidency, to his authority.
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The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.
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The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.
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Take, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances.
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Part of the NAFTA legislation required studies of labor practices, and there was quite a good study that came out by a labor historian on the use of NAFTA to undermine and destroy unions.
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It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism.
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As far as DSA is concerned, I'm perfectly happy to be associated with it while disagreeing with a large part of the leadership.
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Over the years, there's been case after case when there were very narrow decisions that had to be made about whether to launch nuclear weapons in serious cases. What is this guy [Donald Trump] going to do if his vaunted negotiating skills fail, if somebody doesn't do what he says? Is he going to say, Okay we'll nuke them? We're done?
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As the capacity to coerce declines, it is natural to turn to control of opinion as the basis for authority and domination - a fundamental principle of government already emphasized by David Hume.
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Let's imagine again an observer looking at us without any preconceptions. I think he would be struck by the fact that although human beings have the capacity to develop scientific knowledge, it must be a very limited capacity because it is only done in very narrow and specific domains.
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The people who live on the land - Israelis and Palestinians - have a right to live in security and peace.
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It also seems beyond controversy that moral responsibilities are greater to the extent that people have the resources, the training, the facilities and opportunities to speak and act effectively.
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I don't know what it means to say that 'the internet should have a voice in Washington'.
Noam Chomsky
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By most accounts, Aristide is the most popular figure in Haiti.
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The reaction we should be having to [rich liberals] is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany.
Noam Chomsky