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Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.

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
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Philosopher
East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
A. Noam Chomsky
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Up until the First World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
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Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language.
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A lot of people who voted for Trump, working class people, voted for Obama in 2008. They were seduced by the slogans hope and change. They didn't get hope, they didn't get change, they were disillusioned. This time they voted for another candidate who is calling for hope and change and has promised to deliver all kinds of amazing things.
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Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It's something you have to find out for yourself.
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Technology can also be used so that private individuals will have access to the way centralized decisions are being made.
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I think there are all kinds of intrusions into private rights that make use of contemporary technology.
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But on the contrary Wikileaks is under heavy attack by the government and corporations are participating in that by closing down their websites.
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If you're working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.
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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.
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I think that has a lot of dangers, as does government surveillance, which is way too high.
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[Barack] Obama was reaching a point [with Syria bombing] where he might not have been able to carry it off.He was losing support internally, and was compelled to send the vote to Congress, and it looked as if he was going to be defeated, which would have been a very serious blow to his presidency, to his authority.
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What can realistically be done depends on the historical moment. The same is true with regard to the agents.
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Death and genitals are things that frighten people, and when people are frightened, they develop means of concealment and aggression. It is common sense.
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I have never heard of anyone who was a model person in all aspects of his or her life, intellectual life or other aspects nor do I see why anyone should care. We are not engaged in idol worship, after all.
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If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of control, then your world's gone. Like some unusual child who has a million toys and one of them is stolen, he's going to perish.
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To live a life of honesty and integrity is a responsibility of every decent person.
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Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.
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