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The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
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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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.
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Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it's growth in a sense.
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In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.
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Don't be obsessed with tactics but with purpose. Tactics have a half life.
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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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The Iranian government is undoubtedly a severe danger to its own population, but not beyond that.
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Nobody can successfully defy the master of the hemisphere [America], in fact of the world, hence the savagery.
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Barack Obama is an opportunist, mostly supported by the financial institutions. He had no positions on anything. He's very intelligent. If you look at his program, almost no substance. Change, hope, what's that? I mean, he had some policies, but it was almost certain that he would give them up instantly, which he did.
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The attack on unions has been far more extreme here [in U.S], and it has been much more successful.
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.
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Should a community... be free to enact legislation to say they don't want blacks? Now that's illegal. Fifty years ago it was legal. Is that progress or is that regress?
Noam Chomsky
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In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!
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For the past century or so that's [ Monroe Doctrine] actually been true, but it's declining very significantly.
Noam Chomsky
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Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.
Noam Chomsky
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The country was founded on the principle that primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
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The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.
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Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state...
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We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid.
Noam Chomsky
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We have to be irrational and vindictive, because that's going to frighten people. And we have to maintain this for years. And then we'll be able to carry out the actions that we want to carry out.
Noam Chomsky