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People are dangerous. If they're able to involve themselves in issues that matter, they may change the distribution of power, to the detriment of those who are rich and privileged.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
Anthropologist
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Opinion Journalist
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East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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Right now, we happen to be in a general period of regression, not just in education. A lot of what's happening is sort of backlash to the 60s the 60s were a democratizing period.
Noam Chomsky
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The first thing you ought to do is verify what I present. Just because I say it doesn't make it true. So check it out, see what looks correct, what looks wrong, look at other material which wasn't discussed, figure out what the truth really is. That's what you've got a brain for.
Noam Chomsky
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It is an astonishing fact about the current era that in the most powerful country in world history, with a high level of education and privilege, one of the two political parties virtually denies the well-established facts about anthropogenic climate change.
Noam Chomsky
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Regulate the banks, get money out of elections raise the minimum wage, environmental issues. They're all very important and the Occupy movement made a difference. It shifted not only the discourse but to some extent, action on these issues.
Noam Chomsky
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If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.
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I've occasionally been asked to talk on Israel-Palestine. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it elicits hysteria in the community.
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The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.
Noam Chomsky
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Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.
Noam Chomsky
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The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.
Noam Chomsky
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I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
Noam Chomsky
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Education is a system of imposed ignorance.
Noam Chomsky
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How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me.
Noam Chomsky
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The reaction we should be having to [rich liberals] is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany.
Noam Chomsky
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In fact, it's pretty dramatic when you get to 1975, very revealing, the [Vietnam] war ends. Everybody had to write something about the war, what it meant. You also had polls of public opinion, and they're dramatically different.
Noam Chomsky
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Politicians don't want democracy here in America, why would they want it in the Middle East?
Noam Chomsky
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The UN can go as far as the U.S. will allow, and no further. And it's bound by conditions that the powerful states, which means mostly the U.S., impose.
Noam Chomsky
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One measure for promoting both stability and fairness across financial market segments is a small sales tax on all financial transactions.
Noam Chomsky
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It is the worst atrocity underway [in Rwanda]. But it's barely in the media, and people just don't know about it. And that's quite generally true.
Noam Chomsky
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In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.
Noam Chomsky
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One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters
Noam Chomsky