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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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When you read about the end of the Soviet Union, it's always about the death of socialism. They never say the death of democracy. But it makes about the same sense.
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Bradley Manning should be regarded as a hero. He is doing what an honest, decent citizen should be doing: letting your population know what the government, the people who rule you are doing. They want to keep it secret of course.
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Take Germany and Japan, both defeated in the Second World War. Germany has acknowledged its monstrous crimes to a certain extent, has paid reparations and so on. Japan, in contrast, apologizes for nothing and has paid no reparations, with one exception: It pays reparations to the United States, but not to Asia.
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The tendencies are considerably weaker in the natural sciences, which, for the past several centuries, have survived and flourished through such constant challenge, and therefore, at best, seek to encourage it. Serving the status quo in political and socioeconomic realms is a different matter.
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There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.
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I do not see how we can rationally oppose high speed rail because of the environmental and other costs without considering the social and human consequences of the radical elimination of transportation that this entails.
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We're human beings we're not robots. And face-to-face contact is something totally different than typing a text message and then forgetting about it.
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Citizenship means every four years you put a mark somewhere and you go home and let other guys run the world. It's a very destructive ideology.
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Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.
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If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion.
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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.
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I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative.
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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 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.
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The two countries [Pakistan and India] have already come close to nuclear confrontation twice and this could get worse. So dealing with the relationship with India is extremely important.
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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.
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That's a point that Dan Ellsberg has made for years. He said it's kind of like if you and I go into a grocery store to rob it, and I have a gun. The guy may give you the money in the cash register. I'm using the gun even if I don't shoot. Well that's nuclear weapons - essential to post-war deterrence - they cast a shadow over everything.
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It's commonly assumed that the emergence of language was a key element of the great leap. We of course know very little about the sociopolitical conditions that existed at the time, but there's no scenario I can think of that suggests how a sudden change in these conditions could have led to the emergence of language.
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Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?
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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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