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You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Linguist
Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
Chomsky
Cannot
Distracted
Consumption
Population
Control
Force

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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One of the dangers [that Donald Trump poses, due to the augmented risk of nuclear war] is unquestionable. Of the two existential threats - the threats to the termination of the species basically and most other species - one of them, climate change, on that I think there's no basis for discussion.
Noam Chomsky
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America has always been the richest and most secure, and sometimes the most dangerous country in the world. In the early years, the danger was to everybody near us, slaves, Native Americans, Mexicans. It finally expanded in 1898 to the Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines.
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In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
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One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.
Noam Chomsky
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I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.
Noam Chomsky
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With regard to nuclear weapons, it's kind of hard to say. [Donald Trump] is said lots of things. The national security experts are terrified. But they're more terrified by his personality than by his statements.
Noam Chomsky
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Cuba forces in Angola gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can't just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds.
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Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without massive government spending and in fact initiative.
Noam Chomsky
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Personally, I am uneasy about the notion of a politically engaged university, for reasons I wrote about over 30 years ago, at the height of protest and resistance (reprinted in For Reasons of State).
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If current tendencies persist, the outcome will be disastrous before too long. Large parts of the world will become barely habitable affecting hundreds of millions of people, along with other disasters that we can barely contemplate.
Noam Chomsky
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If kids are studying for a test, they're not going to learn anything. We all know that from our own experience.
Noam Chomsky
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There's actually an article in the Washington Post, I don't know whether it's tongue in cheek or not, which said the criterion for being on the list of banned states is that [Donald] Trump doesn't have business interests there.
Noam Chomsky
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I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.
Noam Chomsky
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Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.
Noam Chomsky
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If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.
Noam Chomsky
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The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.
Noam Chomsky
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The ideal is to create a completely fragmented atomized society where everybody is totally alone, doing nothing but trying to pursue created wants, and the wants are created.
Noam Chomsky
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Technology can also be used so that private individuals will have access to the way centralized decisions are being made.
Noam Chomsky
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It turned out that [Bill] Clinton had authorized Texaco to illegally ship oil to the military junta [in Haiti] during a time when we were supposedly opposing the military junta and supporting democracy instead.
Noam Chomsky
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You have to love that government, but hate the government that might work in your interest and that you could control. That's an interesting propaganda task, but it's been carried out very well.
Noam Chomsky