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The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

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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Anything feasible and potentially effective should be explored.
Noam Chomsky
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The term intellectual is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility.
Noam Chomsky
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The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy.
Noam Chomsky
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Of course, everybody says they're for peace. Hitler was for peace. Everybody is for peace. The question is: What kind of peace?
Noam Chomsky
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In Western Europe, Turkey is regarded as uncivilized, so they can't come in into the European Union until they're civilized. I think it's the other way around. If you could achieve the level of civilization of, say, Turkish intelectuals, it would be quite an achievement.
Noam Chomsky
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U.S. international and security policy . . . has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call the Fifth Freedom, understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.
Noam Chomsky
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Maybe the science is uncertain, maybe we don't have to worry about it. Climate change is the worst, but there's others.
Noam Chomsky
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When leaders carry out policies for decades that have no consequences for the stated goal and are very costly, you have to ask whether they are telling you the truth or whether the policies are for a different goal, because they are not reducing drug use.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.
Noam Chomsky
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Major efforts have to be undertaken to bring the general public to understand the real reasons for their plight, and the possibilities for radical social and political change to construct meaningful popular control of all institutions - in communities, in the workplace, in the larger society, and on to the international order.
Noam Chomsky
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We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.
Noam Chomsky
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The invasion of Panama, what was that? The U.S. killed, according to the Panamanians, 3,000 civilians. Maybe they're right. We don't investigate our own crimes, so nobody knows.
Noam Chomsky
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In a moment of crisis, of which there are all too many, Russian military planners may conclude that lacking a deterrent, the only hope of survival is a first strike - which means the end for all of us.
Noam Chomsky
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Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system.
Noam Chomsky
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China has been there for 3,000 years, has contempt for the barbarians, is overcoming a century of domination, and simply moves on its own. It does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his fist. That's scary.
Noam Chomsky
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A good education instills in you the intuitive comprehension - it becomes unconscious and reflexive - that you just don't think certain things, things that are threatening to power interests.
Noam Chomsky
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I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
Noam Chomsky
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John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.
Noam Chomsky
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Our only real hope for democracy is that we get the money out of politics entirely and establish a system of publicly funded elections.
Noam Chomsky