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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: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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East Oak Lane
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It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.
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One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.
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I still think, despite everything, that the US is very unlikely to attack Iran. It could be a huge catastrophe nobody knows what the consequences would be. I imagine that only an administration that's really desperate would resort to that.
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Latin America was the most obedient follower of the neoliberal regime that was instituted by the United States, its allies and the international financial institutions. They followed it most rigorously. Almost everyone who's followed those rules, including the Western countries, have suffered. And in Latin America they suffered severely.
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The Obama administration is dedicated to increasing terrorism. In fact, he is doing it all over the world. Obama is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history. The drone assassination campaigns - which are just part of the special forces operations and so on - all of these operations are terror operations.
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The anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.
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Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.
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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.
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[According to the rigid dogma] we have to believe the United States would have so-called liberated Iraq even if its main products were lettuce and pickles and the main energy resource of the world were in central Africa.
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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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There's never been anything like the so-called Vietnam Syndrome: it's mostly a fabrication.
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It's hard to achieve that, especially in a free society, but it's been done, and that's the kind of thing that activists in the IWW have to work against, right on the shop floor. It's not so simple, but it's been done before.
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China has been there for 3,000 years, has contempt for the barbarians, is overcoming a century of domination, and simply moves on its own. It does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam shakes his fist. That's scary.
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Private companies can make a personal profile, direct you to things - they will say - that you would be interested in, but that's their choice not your choice.
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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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In fact, when drugs are legalized, use sometimes goes down, it's been claimed. Part of the reason is that teenage kids use illicit drugs because they are illicit. They are thumbing their noses at society. If they were legal, they might not.
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The term intellectual is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility.
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Cuba forces in Angola gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can't just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds.
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