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There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
Historian
Human Rights Activist
Linguist
Media Critic
Opinion Journalist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
Chomsky
Study
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Reason
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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As any good teacher knows, the methods of instruction and the range of material covered are matters of small importance as compared with the success in arousing the natural curiosity of the students and stimulating their interest in exploring on their own.
Noam Chomsky
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Ronald Reagan in the US was not a particularly popular president, but after his death sectors of wealth and power created a huge propaganda campaign that converted this disgraceful figure into a semi-divinity.
Noam Chomsky
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Intellectuals of the categories happen to enjoy unusual privilege, unique in history, I suppose. It's easy enough to find ugly illustrations of repression, malice, dishonesty, marginalization and exclusion in the academic world.
Noam Chomsky
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Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.
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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The Saudi, Arabian ruling class, for example, have rights because they are performing a service for Western power, ensuring that oil profits go to the West and not to the regional population. The local gendarmes like Israel, Turkey and so on have rights, at least in their ruling groups. Others do not.
Noam Chomsky
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The change between horse and buggy to automobile is a big change and there hasn't been a major change since.
Noam Chomsky
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Our minds are specifically adapted to developing certain theories, and we have a science if the theories that are available to our minds happen to be close to true. Well, there is no particular reason to suppose that the intersection of true theories and theories that are accessible to the mind is very large. It may not be very large.
Noam Chomsky
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Markets also have a very bad psychological effect. They drive people to a conception of themselves and society in which you're only after your own good, not the good of others and that's extremely harmful.
Noam Chomsky
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The very properties of the human mind that provide an enormous scope for human genius in some domains will serve as barriers to progress in other domains, just as the properties that enable each child to acquire a complex and highly articulated human language block the acquisition of other imaginable linguistic systems.
Noam Chomsky
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It doesn't matter how much you learn in school it's whether you learn how to go on and do things by yourself. And that can be done at any level.
Noam Chomsky
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We still name our military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its military helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice.
Noam Chomsky
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Fed and electoral college could use some tinkering, but they are not the source of the problems.
Noam Chomsky
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They [unions] used straight Marxist rhetoric [in 1930s] - just the values were changed.
Noam Chomsky
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The whole infrastructure of air travel was, and is, part of government policy. It is not a natural development of a free economic system - at least not in the way that is claimed. The same is true of the roads, of course.
Noam Chomsky
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It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.
Noam Chomsky
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Borders are semiporous. Capital flows more freely than people across them. on C Span.
Noam Chomsky
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The two tendencies are antithetical in significant respects. These are distinctions that should be kept in mind, however one feels that the problems and dilemmas that constantly arise should be resolved.
Noam Chomsky
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The House of Representatives, which was closer to the population, had much less power. The executive was more or less an administrator, not an emperor like today.
Noam Chomsky
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I didn't pay my taxes for years.
Noam Chomsky