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Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.

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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When people say do you believe in God? what do they mean by it? Do I believe in some spiritual force in the world? In a way, yes. People have thoughts, emotions. If you want to call that a spiritual force, okay. But unless there's some clarification of what we're supposed to believe in or disbelieve in, I can't answer.
Noam Chomsky
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You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.
Noam Chomsky
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Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics - chemistry, the structure of big molecules - in those domains, there is a lot of progress. In many other domains, there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding.
Noam Chomsky
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I don't think you would have any trouble at all in deciding that you are thinking of some event and then visualizing it happening with its consequences, and constructing a rational analysis of it without being able to verbalize it adequately in anything like its full complexity.
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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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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I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.
Noam Chomsky
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In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev's willingness to accept Kennedy's hegemonic demands.
Noam Chomsky
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...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.
Noam Chomsky
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We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be a world - at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.
Noam Chomsky
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They [unions] used straight Marxist rhetoric [in 1930s] - just the values were changed.
Noam Chomsky
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We don't live in tyrannies, you know, the king doesn't decide what's legitimate, and there's much more freedom than there was in the past.
Noam Chomsky
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Should people be mere interested spectators of action, not participants, restricted to lending their weight periodically to one or another sector of the responsible men, as advocates of manufacture of consent have recommended? Or should their rights transcend these highly restricted bounds?
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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The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn't make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn't discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That's what you've got a brain for.
Noam Chomsky
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Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without massive government spending and in fact initiative.
Noam Chomsky
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Western intellectuals, and also Third World intellectuals, were attracted to the Bolshevik counter-revolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine which says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.
Noam Chomsky
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The US does not observe the free-trade principles. Those are for the weak. So agribusiness is highly subsidized and pours product into Mexico and drives out Mexican farmers. Maybe they have to go into the cities, and they don't have jobs to support them, so they flee across the border.
Noam Chomsky
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I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened.
Noam Chomsky
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Greece, alone, is in a very vulnerable position. If the Greeks had had support from progressive left and popular forces elsewhere in Europe they might have been able to resist the demands of the Troika, but they had almost no support. Not even from Portugal, Spain, or other left forces. They were left alone.
Noam Chomsky