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With regard to freedom of expression there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it in favor of Stalinist/Fascist standards.

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 something is right (or wrong) for us, it’s right (or wrong) for others. It follows that if it’s wrong for Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and a long list of others to bomb Washington and New York, then it’s wrong for Rumsfeld to bomb Afghanistan (on much flimsier pretexts), and he should be brought before war crimes trials.
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Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.
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The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.
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Half the population hold that the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves, as polls regularly show.
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I like the cold weather. It means you get work done.
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The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. Straight-out war crime.
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Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course) the US wants to maintain it. An interesting story. There seems to me no easy way out of this.
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I think half the population supports this ban on these dangerous immigrants who are going to come in and do something, who knows what. And meanwhile the countries that really have been involved in terrorism, they're out. It's kind of like I think it was Oklahoma banning Sharia law.
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If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you're doing something wrong.
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Education is a system of imposed ignorance.
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Obama's primary constituency was financial institutions. They were the core of the funding for his campaign. They expect to be paid back. And they were. They were paid back by coming out richer and more powerful than they were before the crisis that they created.
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If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
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In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.
Noam Chomsky
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The very idea that there should be a certain class of people who give orders by virtue of their ownership of wealth and another huge class who take on orders and follow them because of their lack of access to wealth and power, that's unacceptable. So, sure it should be abolished.
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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If voting could actually change anything, it would be illegal.
Noam Chomsky
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Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.
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I suspect most likely that more Nazis came to America. I was a student at Harvard during the early 1950s. There was practically no Jewish faculty there.
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If you want to scare people, you talk about evil.
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Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.
Noam Chomsky