Quote

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

Noam Chomsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
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
Art
Real
Folk
Forth
Popular
Folks
Songs
Song
Culture

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

Image
Radical activists can't ignore the fact that we live in this world, like it or not, and have to make difficult decisions about which paths are the best - or sometimes, the least harmful. There are no abstract formulas. Have to think through each case on its own.
Noam Chomsky
Image
I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to educate them to keep them from our throats, to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson's parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Intellectuals of the categories happen to enjoy unusual privilege, unique in history, I suppose. It's easy enough to find ugly illustrations of repression, malice, dishonesty, marginalization and exclusion in the academic world.
Noam Chomsky
Image
I think there is a good reason why the propaganda system works that way. It recognizes that the public will not support the actual policies. Therefore it is important to prevent any knowledge or understanding of them.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Colombia has been the leading western recipient of U.S. arms and training as violence has grown through the '90s.
Noam Chomsky
Image
People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.
Noam Chomsky
Image
I am not offering this is a critique of the internet, its just that there are a lot of factors involved. It does offer plenty of possibilities. It also has, it can have, a cheapening effect and I think both exist and I think its true of everything. You could say that about the printing press.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Unaccountable private power concentrations that dominate economic and social life have the means to seek to regiment the public mind, and become tools and tyrants of government, in James Madison's memorable phrase, as he warned of the threats he discerned to the democratic experiment if private powers were granted free rein.
Noam Chomsky
Image
That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.
Noam Chomsky
Image
It is ... necessary to whip up the population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you have to frighten them.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Suppose that we believe what we are taught. . . . destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies . . . of institutional lunacy.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Thanh Hoa itself is a rich agricultural province. Rice fields, a pattern of many shades of green, stretch far into the distance along the road, which also winds through foothills and the fringes of heavy jungle where tigers are said to roam. The vegetation, wild or cultivated, is lush.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.
Noam Chomsky
Image
It's commonly assumed that the emergence of language was a key element of the great leap. We of course know very little about the sociopolitical conditions that existed at the time, but there's no scenario I can think of that suggests how a sudden change in these conditions could have led to the emergence of language.
Noam Chomsky
Image
...dissent, protest, presures of a wide variety that escape elite control can modify the calculus of costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that Washington can be compelled to permit at least some steps towards justice, freedom and democracy within its domains.
Noam Chomsky
Image
International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn't pay his protection money. You have to have obedience otherwise the idea can spread that you don't have to listen to the orders and it can spread to important places.
Noam Chomsky
Image
There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of Anglo-Saxon Law. And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.
Noam Chomsky
Image
When you read about the end of the Soviet Union, it's always about the death of socialism. They never say the death of democracy. But it makes about the same sense.
Noam Chomsky