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As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Venezuela is independent. It's diversifying its exports to a limited extent, instead of just being dependent on exports to the United States. And it's initiating moves toward Latin American integration and independence. It's what they call a Bolivarian alternative and the United States doesn't like any of that.
Noam Chomsky
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There are all the activist groups on every imaginable topic - solidarity groups, environmental and feminist groups - sectors of these movements do very valuable work.
Noam Chomsky
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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
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We must present a national persona of being irrational and vindictive, because that's going to terrify people. And then, they'll back off. And this is not [Donald] Trump, this is [Bill] Clinton. It's not [Richard] Nixon, you know. We have to be irrational and vindictive, because that's going to frighten people.
Noam Chomsky
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While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.
Noam Chomsky
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As long as nuclear weapons exist, the chances of survival of the human species are quite slight.
Noam Chomsky
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I don't think that experience is a very useful or convincing attribute for a sensible foreign policy. Henry Kissinger had a lot of experience.
Noam Chomsky
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If you're in favour of any policy - reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever - if you're at least minimally moral, it's because you think it's somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.
Noam Chomsky
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Civil disobedience's main goal typically is to try to arouse and inspire others to join and do something. Well, sometimes that is a good tactic, sometimes not.
Noam Chomsky
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George Washington hated the guerrillas. He wanted to imitate the British red coat armies, fighting as gentlemen are supposed to fight.
Noam Chomsky
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Because the 1979 strike against U.S. Steel in Youngstown, Ohio was an occupation - and actually, that's a model that really should be pursued now.They went on from striking to trying to have the workforce and the communities take over the abandoned factories that U.S. Steel was dismantling.
Noam Chomsky
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You can't get votes that way. So [the Republicans] have been compelled to mobilize a base of voters and gone to elements of the country that have always been there but were kind of marginal to the political system, for example, religious extremists.
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.
Noam Chomsky
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What right does the US have to do anything in Colombia? Does Colombia have the right to bomb North Carolina? There are more Colombians dying from tobacco than Americans dying from heroin.
Noam Chomsky
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On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.
Noam Chomsky
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Elements of the Christian fundamentalist right are one of the strongest components of support for Israel - support in an odd sense, because they presumably want to see it destroyed in a cosmic battle at Armageddon, after which all the proper souls will ascend to heaven - or so I understand, again, not from close reading.
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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Borders are semiporous. Capital flows more freely than people across them. on C Span.
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
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If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.
Noam Chomsky