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States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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If you're working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.
Noam Chomsky
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I'm sorry to say it has some historical analogs. It's kind of reminiscent of what happened in Germany in the late Weimar years.
Noam Chomsky
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Somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence, which is a strange, but striking, phenomenon. The fact is, we can do just about anything. There is no difficulty, wherever you are, in finding groups that are working hard on things that concern you.
Noam Chomsky
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I can understand the idea that there is a conspiracy. In fact, in much of the world there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense. They [CIA] created a monster and now they are appalled by it.
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Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.
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The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.
Noam Chomsky
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The [Ronald] Reagan administration told the business world that they were not going to enforce the labor laws.
Noam Chomsky
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The basic principle is that the losers have to confess, not the victors. When they do it, it's a crime. When we do it, it's not. And more generally, it's the defeated who are tried, not the victors.
Noam Chomsky
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Enormous and growing parts of the population are basically superfluous for profit-making purposes. Along with this, the jail population is increasing very rapidly it's the highest in the industrial world by far. New and onerous crime bills are being passed to deal with this superfluous population.
Noam Chomsky
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On intervention under the UN framework, I think that sometimes that's legitimate, in fact even helpful.
Noam Chomsky
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Evolutionary theory has nothing to say, in general, as to whether cheating is more advantageous than cooperating. There are many circumstances in which the contrary would be true, and empirical evidence, though it exists, has little bearing on real situations.
Noam Chomsky
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I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to educate them to keep them from our throats, to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson's parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education.
Noam Chomsky
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I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.
Noam Chomsky
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To construct a scientific theory from the data and to be able to recognize that it is a reasonable theory is possible only if there are some very sharp restrictive principles that lead you to go in one direction and not in another direction. Otherwise, you wouldn't have science at all, merely randomly chosen hypotheses.
Noam Chomsky
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[ Republican Party] is correctly described as a radical insurgency by one of the leading conservative commentators, Norman Ornstein.
Noam Chomsky
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Human needs are served by a sustainable lifestyle, almost by definition, if humans include coming generations. And a shift to such technologies as high-speed rail instead of maximizing fossil fuel use, and solar energy, is not relentless resource extraction.
Noam Chomsky
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There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders.
Noam Chomsky
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US wars are going to be against much weaker enemies. And they have to be won quickly and decisively before a popular reaction develops.
Noam Chomsky