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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: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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[Internet] is kind of like a hammer. The technology itself doesn't determine how its used. It depends on the social, cultural and economic context in which the technology is made available.
Noam Chomsky
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Some international law specialists compare the invasion of Iraq to the 'crimes against the peace' for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg.
Noam Chomsky
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The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
Noam Chomsky
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Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.
Noam Chomsky
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In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom - along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.
Noam Chomsky
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There's a very striking fact about the elections which you can't miss if you looked at the red-and-blue electoral map the next day: it's the same political landscape that you saw during the Civil War - nothing much has changed except the party names.
Noam Chomsky
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WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for - presidential medal of honor.
Noam Chomsky
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Personally, I am uneasy about the notion of a politically engaged university, for reasons I wrote about over 30 years ago, at the height of protest and resistance (reprinted in For Reasons of State).
Noam Chomsky
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Whenever there is injustice, oppression, aggression, violence, it's standard for it to be supported by those we now call intellectuals, but typically not by all there is typically a fringe of dissidents. With very rare exceptions - in fact, it's hard to think of any - they suffer in one or another way how depends on the nature of the society.
Noam Chomsky
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If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.
Noam Chomsky
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I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.
Noam Chomsky
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Sea level rise and destruction of water resources as glaciers melt alone may have horrendous human consequences.
Noam Chomsky
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Trump's principal policies make clear what's going to happen. This gives an opportunity. Right now it's going to take hard work, but it's possible that there could be a real revival of the labor movement.
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
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The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it's called democratic.
Noam Chomsky
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The fact of the matter is that the U.S. is run by an unusually class-conscious, dedicated business class that has a very violent labor history, much worse than in Europe.
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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Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.
Noam Chomsky
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A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.
Noam Chomsky
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The internet is something created largely by public funding.
Noam Chomsky