Quote

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

Noam Chomsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Noam Chomsky
Age: 96
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
Words
Language
History
Unification
Culture
Embodied
Whole
Creates
Tradition
Communication
Community

More quotes by Noam Chomsky

Image
Latin America wants to decriminalize at least marijuana (maybe more or course) the US wants to maintain it. An interesting story. There seems to me no easy way out of this.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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.
Noam Chomsky
Image
It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.
Noam Chomsky
Image
In much of the world the U.S. is regarded as a leading terrorist state.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Western intellectuals, and also Third World intellectuals, were attracted to the Bolshevik counter-revolution because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine which says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.
Noam Chomsky
Image
In a moment of crisis, of which there are all too many, Russian military planners may conclude that lacking a deterrent, the only hope of survival is a first strike - which means the end for all of us.
Noam Chomsky
Image
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
Image
Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.
Noam Chomsky
Image
What is called 'capitalism'is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close cooperation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society.
Noam Chomsky
Image
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
Noam Chomsky
Image
the Federal Reserve, has an official commitment to two different policies. One is to prevent inflation from getting too high. The second is to maintain high employment... The European central bank has only the first. It has no commitment to keep employment up.
Noam Chomsky
Image
What the polls don't tell you is, though other polls do, is that if you do a study of CEOs, top executives in corporations, they're liberal.
Noam Chomsky
Image
We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
Noam Chomsky
Image
In southern culture, possession of a gun became kind of a sign of manhood, not just because of slaves but other white men. If you had a gun, you're not going to push me around. You know, I'm not one of those guys you can kick in the face.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull.
Noam Chomsky
Image
No sane human being devotes 100% of his or her life to political activism.
Noam Chomsky
Image
A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.
Noam Chomsky
Image
If humans are organisms like every other organism - which they are - then we should expect that if there are some domains where real scientific progress is possible, then there are others where it is not.
Noam Chomsky
Image
Colombia was a big wheat producer in the 1950's. That was eliminated by what sounds like a nice plan, called Food for Peace. It's a plan by which US taxpayers subsidized US agribusiness to send food to poor countries. This, of course, destroyed the domestic agricultural markets of these countries, opening these markets to US agribusiness.
Noam Chomsky
Image
[CIA manipulating] has its roots in internal Pakistani affairs. It's a horrible development and phenomenon which goes back to radical Islamisation under Zia and taking away the long standing rights of people in the tribal areas [who were left largely alone].
Noam Chomsky