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The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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East Oak Lane
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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If a person chooses not to be a writer, or speaker, then (by definition) the person is choosing not to be engaged in an effort,to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them, apart, perhaps, from some circle of immediate associates.
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Mexico is a pretty poor country, but they are maintaining a free, high quality public education system, not for everyone of course but pretty substantial.
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United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that's what it's good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary.
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There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich.
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My feeling is that if any Republican was elected it would be almost a death knell for the species literally, just because of their attitude on climate change.
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As far as U.S. intelligence knows, Iran is developing nuclear capacities, but they don't know if they are trying to develop nuclear weapons or not. Chances are they're developing what's called 'nuclear capability,' which many states have. That is the ability to have nuclear weapons if they decide to do it. That's not a crime.
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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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I don't see how one can believe in organized religion. What does it mean to believe in an organization? One can join it, support it, oppose it, accept its doctrines or reject them. There are many kinds of organized religion. People associate themselves with some of them, or not, for all sorts of reasons, maybe belief in some of their doctrines
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In the late 1990s, some of the worst terrorist atrocities in the world were what the Turkish government itself called state terror, namely massive atrocities, 80 percent of the arms coming from the United States, millions of refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, hideous repression, that's international terror, and we can go on and on.
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I don't really think there have been transitional periods to socialism. There have been efforts, but they have usually been destroyed by a combination of external force and internal corruption.
Noam Chomsky
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If the authors and custodians of history turn out to have an attractive image, it is only reasonable to look beyond and ask whether the image they construct is accurate.
Noam Chomsky
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There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.
Noam Chomsky
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Take a look at public opinion. About 70 percent of the population, in the polls, said the [Vietnam ] war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. And that attitude lasted as long as polls were taken in the early '80s.
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If you look at say, England and Germany a century ago, which had the most advanced navies then, they were dealing with extremely tricky technological problems. Putting a huge gun on a moving platform and ensuring that it could hit another moving target was one of the hardest technical problems of the early twentieth century.
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Why not stakeholder action? There's no economic principal that says that management should be responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business economics that they could just as well have a system in which the management is responsible to stakeholders.
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Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.
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. . . among all grammars meeting this condition (of adequacy), we select the simplest.
Noam Chomsky
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Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language.
Noam Chomsky
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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
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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