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We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.
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That's a large part of the source of the gun culture. You have to have a gun when you go into Starbucks, because who knows what's going to happen. It just doesn't happen in other countries.
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After all, the internet originated around 1960 and wasn't privatized until 1995. That's thirty five years in the public domain during the hard, creative development period.
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Take something you really don't think about: Plastics in the ocean. I mean plastics in the ocean have an enormous ecological effect.
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The uniformity and obedience of the media, which any dictator would admire...
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They are involve in producing products and there are different kinds of people running them, but the principle is the same. A corporation shouldn't have the right. Under American law as its developed over the past century, corporation do have personal rights, but I think that's a very negative development.
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If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.
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The US health-care system is a complete scandal. It's got twice the costs of comparable countries and some of the worst outcomes.
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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 workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health.
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Insofar as the universities are free and independent, they will also be subversive, in the sense that dominant structures of power and their ideological support will be subjected to challenge and critique, a counterpart to attitudes that are fostered in the hard sciences wherever they are taken seriously.
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I think this country and the world would be far better off if the US is not an outlaw state.
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We can try to gain some of the sensibility of some of the indigenous populations of the world or our predecessors 800 years ago. We can laugh at them as being naive and unsophisticated, but unless we can gain that sensibility that there has to be rights of nature as Bolivians and others put it, then we're going to be destroyed.
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Immediately after 11 September, the U.S. closed down the Somali charitable network Al-Barakaat on grounds that it was financing terror. This achievement was hailed one of the great successes of the 'war on terror.' In contrast, Washington's withdrawal of its charges as without merit a year later aroused little notice.
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My feeling is that the Supreme Court reached a reasonable standard of protection of speech in the 1960s, a standard higher than any other country in the world, to my knowledge. In brief, speech should be protected up to participation in imminent criminal action.
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...free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.
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The two countries [Pakistan and India] have already come close to nuclear confrontation twice and this could get worse. So dealing with the relationship with India is extremely important.
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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.
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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.
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You might recall, perhaps, that we were probably the only commentators to rely on the most knowledgeable source, State Department intelligence.
Noam Chomsky