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The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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The question in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided . . . democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured they may well be essential to survival.
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The people who live on the land - Israelis and Palestinians - have a right to live in security and peace.
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The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy.
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It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.
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The Russians were doing a lot of rotten things, you can point to them. But the idea that if you consider what Hans Morgenthau called I called abuse of reality, the picture of the world was almost the opposite of what they presented. But somehow this sells and is continually repeated, at least in this kind of situation.
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Anything feasible and potentially effective should be explored.
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There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.
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A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.
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In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.
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The actual consequences of Plan Colombia are to devastate peasant communities, which have been driven to drug production. These peasants have no particular desire to grow coca, but their other means of livelihood have been wiped out.
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Politicians don't want democracy here in America, why would they want it in the Middle East?
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[Health-care system] is largely privatized and unregulated. So of course it's highly inefficient and costly.
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Destruction of the environment is not only rational it's exactly what you're taught to do in college.
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For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade.
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I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.
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On intervention under the UN framework, I think that sometimes that's legitimate, in fact even helpful.
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History records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones it also records painful reversals and setbacks.
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A default of the US government would not only be very harmful here, it would probably send the country back into deep recession, but it just might crash the international financial system.
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Sooner or later, jihadist-style terror and WMD are going to come together and the consequences could be horrendous.
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We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.
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