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The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That's never been impossible and never been easy.

Noam Chomsky

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

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I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.
Noam Chomsky
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It seems self-evident that we should want people to be free, to be able to play an active part in making decisions about matters of concern to them, to the largest possible extent.
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Julian Assange shouldn't be the subject of a grand jury hearing, he should be given a medal. He's contributing to democracy.
Noam Chomsky
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One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters
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Colombia was a big wheat producer in the 1950's. That was eliminated by what sounds like a nice plan, called Food for Peace. It's a plan by which US taxpayers subsidized US agribusiness to send food to poor countries. This, of course, destroyed the domestic agricultural markets of these countries, opening these markets to US agribusiness.
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Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.
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As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized.
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I don't really think there have been transitional periods to socialism. There have been efforts, but they have usually been destroyed by a combination of external force and internal corruption.
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.
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It was right after Woodrow Wilson's first serious post-World War I repression, which deported thousands of people, effectively destroyed unions and independent press, and so on. Right after that, the anti-immigration law was passed that remained in place until the 1960s.
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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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... the media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly.
Noam Chomsky
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The Bush Administration do have moral values. Their moral values are very explicit: shine the boots of the rich and the powerful, kick everybody else in the face, and let your grandchildren pay for it. That simple principle predicts almost everything that's happening.
Noam Chomsky
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The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.
Noam Chomsky
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I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array of structured expressions was in effect instantaneous. I have never heard of an alternative to this suggestion.
Noam Chomsky
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I happened to go to a school when I was a kid and that's all we did, pursue our own interests. It was kind of structured so you ended up knowing everything you were supposed to know, arithmetic, Latin, whatever it was. But almost always it was under your own initiative.
Noam Chomsky
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Stock ownership in the US is very highly concentrated. [Shareholder actions are] something, but it's like the old Communist Party in the USSR, it would be nice to see more protest inside the Communist Party but it's not democracy. It's not going to happen. [Shareholder actions] are a good step, but they're mostly symbolic.
Noam Chomsky
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Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense, but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn't survive very long if they did that.
Noam Chomsky
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In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It's hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce.
Noam Chomsky
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We [ with Edward Herman] believe that the empirical evidence we review there - and elsewhere, in a great deal of joint and separate work - lends substantial support to the conclusions whether that is true is for others to judge.
Noam Chomsky