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The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.

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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Avram Noam Chomsky
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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When I was ten years old I wanted to be a taxidermist for some reason, don't ask me why.
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The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that's happening.
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Real wages for male workers in the United States are about what they were in the '60s.
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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.
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What is credibility? It's a very familiar notion. It's basically the notion that is central to the Mafia. So suppose say the Godfather produces some kind of edict and says you're going to have to pay protection money.
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The United States has done some very good things in the world, and that does not change the fact that the World Court was quite correct in condemning the United States as an international terrorist state.
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Suppose that we believe what we are taught. . . . destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies . . . of institutional lunacy.
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I don't think all thinking is a kind of rational structure. But I don't think it is correct to identify the rational-nonrational dichotomy with the linguistic-nonlinguistic dichotomy.
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People tend to rally around power.
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Remember that in any major nuclear war, the first strike destroys the country that attacks it's been known for years. The first strike of a major power is very likely to cause what's called nuclear winter, leads to global famine for years and everything's basically gone. Some survivors straggling around. Could [Donald Trump] do it? Who knows.
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Every wave of immigrants who came [to America] were treated pretty badly, but when they all finally became integrated, all of us became Anglo-Saxons.
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Another problem is the confrontation with India. Pakistan just cannot survive if it continues to do so (continue this confrontation).
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It makes sense for societies to make education compulsory for children. Children are vulnerable. They can't make decisions. But the decisions can't all be left in the hands of the parents. They can be irresponsible too.
Noam Chomsky
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The United States is a violent military state. It's been involved in military action all over the place.
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Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.
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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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The people I find most impressive are generally unknown at the time of their actions and forgotten in history.
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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.
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For example, when my father was able to buy a secondhand car in the late 1930s, and he took us to the countryside for a weekend, if we looked for a motel to stay in we had to see if it said restricted on it. Restricted meant no Jews.
Noam Chomsky
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In the primary debates for the 2016 election, every single Republican candidate was a climate change denier, with one exception, John Kasich - the rational moderate - who said it may be happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. For a long time, the media have downplayed the issue.
Noam Chomsky