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I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
Computer Scientist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.
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Anything feasible and potentially effective should be explored.
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There are all the activist groups on every imaginable topic - solidarity groups, environmental and feminist groups - sectors of these movements do very valuable work.
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Latin America is all moving to the left, from Venezuela to Argentina with rare exceptions, but there's a good left and a bad left.
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Poor whites didn't have rights. They made all kind of restrictions on voting. So person meant relatively well - off, free white man.
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People who spend their working hours in a lab or research library or a classroom might be intent primarily on keeping or advancing their elite positions, thereby lending tacit support to power structures. Or they might not be.
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United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that's what it's good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary.
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If Palestinian Authority refuse to join the US-run negotiations, their basis for support would collapse. They survive on donations essentially. Israel has made sure that it's not a productive economy.
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South America goes its own way dramatically in international affairs.
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Pakistan is not a unified country. In large parts of the country, the state is regarded as a Punjabi state, not their (the people's) state.
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There was great anxiety about Russian intervention in the recent German elections, perhaps contributing to the frightening surge of support for the right-wing nationalist, if not neo-fascist, Alternative for Germany.
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There have been repeated cases when nuclear war came ominously close, often a result of malfunctioning of early-warning systems and other accidents, sometimes [as a result of] highly adventurist acts of political leaders.
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Everything depends very much on who you are, what your values are, what your commitments are, what circumstances you live in and what options you're willing to undertake, and that determines what you ought to be doing.
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Hume's paradox does hold: power is in the hands of the governed. If they refuse to accept it, you're in trouble, no matter how many guns you have.
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How it is we have so much information, but know so little?
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One of the dangers [that Donald Trump poses, due to the augmented risk of nuclear war] is unquestionable. Of the two existential threats - the threats to the termination of the species basically and most other species - one of them, climate change, on that I think there's no basis for discussion.
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Major efforts have to be undertaken to bring the general public to understand the real reasons for their plight, and the possibilities for radical social and political change to construct meaningful popular control of all institutions - in communities, in the workplace, in the larger society, and on to the international order.
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I think such an inquiry will reveal a rather different picture: namely, it will reveal a very strong tendency for the intellectuals who are respected and privileged to be those who subordinate themselves to power.
Noam Chomsky
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The internet is something created largely by public funding.
Noam Chomsky
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Roughly speaking, I think it's accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure.
Noam Chomsky