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The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

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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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place
Noam Chomsky
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The tendencies are considerably weaker in the natural sciences, which, for the past several centuries, have survived and flourished through such constant challenge, and therefore, at best, seek to encourage it. Serving the status quo in political and socioeconomic realms is a different matter.
Noam Chomsky
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But on the contrary Wikileaks is under heavy attack by the government and corporations are participating in that by closing down their websites.
Noam Chomsky
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The free market is 'socialism' for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit - markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich.
Noam Chomsky
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The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it's likely to harm them.
Noam Chomsky
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It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.
Noam Chomsky
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Work can be undertaken to create an authentic independent political party, a real party, based on popular participation from the ground up, not a top-down candidate producing organization like the two official parties, working from school boards to state legislatures and beyond. Not easy in the regressive U.S. political system, but not impossible.
Noam Chomsky
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Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.
Noam Chomsky
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The West Bank is essentially imprisoned.
Noam Chomsky
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Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.
Noam Chomsky
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It's roughly the case that if systems become too complex to study in sufficient depth, physics hands them over to chemistry, then to biology, then experimental psychology, and finally on to history. Roughly. These are tendencies, and they tend to distinguish roughly between hard and soft sciences.
Noam Chomsky
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Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
Noam Chomsky
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Dissidents are not imprisoned as in the domains of the Kremlin, in the old days. They do not have their brains blown out by elite forces armed and trained by the reigning superpower, as happens in Washington's domains - with no particular concern at home - an important fact, one of many that help us learn about ourselves, if we choose.
Noam Chomsky
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It is only natural to expect that guilds will tend to protect their turf and to resist challenge.
Noam Chomsky
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The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn't make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn't discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That's what you've got a brain for.
Noam Chomsky
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A functioning eco-system is a human need.
Noam Chomsky
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I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative.
Noam Chomsky
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Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
Noam Chomsky
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There certainly are those who worship the state much as divinities are worshipped. Not just the state but even leaders.
Noam Chomsky
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Intellectuals (in the standard sense of the term, not [ Edward] Said's prescriptive sense) are the people who write history.
Noam Chomsky