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If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

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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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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Since the civil war in Laos was resumed in earnest in 1963, American participation has been veiled in secrecy.
Noam Chomsky
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In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.
Noam Chomsky
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There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
Noam Chomsky
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What the [James] Monroe Doctrine stated, in effect, is that the US should dominate the hemisphere.
Noam Chomsky
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If humans are organisms like every other organism - which they are - then we should expect that if there are some domains where real scientific progress is possible, then there are others where it is not.
Noam Chomsky
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If something is right (or wrong) for us, it’s right (or wrong) for others. It follows that if it’s wrong for Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and a long list of others to bomb Washington and New York, then it’s wrong for Rumsfeld to bomb Afghanistan (on much flimsier pretexts), and he should be brought before war crimes trials.
Noam Chomsky
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Given their unusual privilege, Western intellectuals can realistically accomplish a great deal. The limits are imposed by will more than objective circumstances. And about human will predictions are without value.
Noam Chomsky
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There is no western concern for issues of aggression, atrocities, human rights abuses and so on if there's a profit to be made from them
Noam Chomsky
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If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.
Noam Chomsky
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If the rewiring of the brain that yielded recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions took place in an individual, not a group (and there seems to be no coherent alternative), then interaction must have been a later phenomenon.
Noam Chomsky
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The people I find most impressive are generally unknown at the time of their actions and forgotten in history.
Noam Chomsky
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The UN to some extent diffuses U.S. power. Therefore it's less direct an agency of the United States than the U.S. Army is. But still, it can't escape the distribution of power in the world.
Noam Chomsky
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If you want to end terrorism stop participating in it.
Noam Chomsky
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The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.
Noam Chomsky
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Bear in mind that we [ with Edward Herman] did not devise the terms manufacture of consent and engineering of consent. We borrowed them from leading figures in the media, public relations industry, and academic scholarship.
Noam Chomsky
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The anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.
Noam Chomsky
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What can you do to mitigate the likelihood that Iran will develop nuclear weapons? There's a very simple method: move towards establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone, which everybody in the world wants, but the US blocks.
Noam Chomsky
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It is the worst atrocity underway [in Rwanda]. But it's barely in the media, and people just don't know about it. And that's quite generally true.
Noam Chomsky
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A basic principle of modern state capitalism is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized.
Noam Chomsky