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We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.

Noam Chomsky

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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
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Popular support for alternative energy has been very high for years. But it harms corporate profits.
Noam Chomsky
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Those are possibilities for technology, which don't tend to be used, because of the way power is concentrated. There are all kinds of possibilities, including for coercion. In China, technology is used to control and coerce. Here too, to an extent, but not to that extent.
Noam Chomsky
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In a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time. They're instinctive Marxists.
Noam Chomsky
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In fact, it's pretty dramatic when you get to 1975, very revealing, the [Vietnam] war ends. Everybody had to write something about the war, what it meant. You also had polls of public opinion, and they're dramatically different.
Noam Chomsky
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If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
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People have to be atomized and segregated and alone. They're not supposed to organize, because then they might be something beyond spectators of action. They might actually be participants if many people with limited resources could get together to enter the political arena. That's really threatening.
Noam Chomsky
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The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.
Noam Chomsky
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I felt that we could hardly improve on the conception of the university expressed by one of the founders of the modern system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, also one of the founders of classical liberalism. That seems to me true today as well, though ideals of course have to be adapted to changing circumstances.
Noam Chomsky
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Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.
Noam Chomsky
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...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
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We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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The House of Representatives, which was closer to the population, had much less power. The executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor like today.
Noam Chomsky
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No sane human being devotes 100% of his or her life to political activism.
Noam Chomsky
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Take Germany and Japan, both defeated in the Second World War. Germany has acknowledged its monstrous crimes to a certain extent, has paid reparations and so on. Japan, in contrast, apologizes for nothing and has paid no reparations, with one exception: It pays reparations to the United States, but not to Asia.
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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When I am at home, I never watch TV, but when I am abroad in a hotel I take a look at the BBC to find out what's going on.
Noam Chomsky
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Roughly speaking, I think it's accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure.
Noam Chomsky
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To live a life of honesty and integrity is a responsibility of every decent person.
Noam Chomsky
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The missile defense component is a minor feature that nobody takes very seriously. Nobody really believes that the US is trying to protect itself from North Korea. That's not serious. But the militarization of space is quite serious.
Noam Chomsky