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It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.

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
Pedagogue
Philosopher
East Oak Lane
Philadelphia
Avram Noam Chomsky
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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There are major efforts being made to dismantle Social Security, the public schools, the post office - anything that benefits the population has to be dismantled. Efforts against the U.S. Postal Service are particularly surreal.
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There is a kind of nonlinguistic thought going on which we are trying to represent in language, and we know that sometimes we fail.
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Today, aid to Colombia is given under the pretext of a drug war. That's pretty hard to take seriously. Ten years ago, Amnesty International flatly called it a myth.
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The Russians were doing a lot of rotten things, you can point to them. But the idea that if you consider what Hans Morgenthau called I called abuse of reality, the picture of the world was almost the opposite of what they presented. But somehow this sells and is continually repeated, at least in this kind of situation.
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The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination,' we might say - exercised through the mass media.
Noam Chomsky
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During the 1990's, Colombia was the leading recipient of US military aid and training in the hemisphere. Approximately half of all US aid in the hemisphere went to Colombia. Colombia was also far and away the leading human rights violator in the hemisphere.
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The ideal is to create a completely fragmented atomized society where everybody is totally alone, doing nothing but trying to pursue created wants, and the wants are created.
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Washington still refuses to provide evidence to support the claims in 1990 that a huge Iraqi military build-up on the Saudi border justified war.
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There's very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfaction - that is, the hatred and the anger - they come from acceptance of American values, not a rejection of them, and recognition that they're rejected by the U.S. government and by U.S. elites, which does lead to hatred and anger.
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The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.
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I think that we have basically nothing in the field of human behavior. Maybe that is just a condition of temporary ignorance. But it may be that we are simply not intellectually equipped to develop such a theory.
Noam Chomsky
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In the major state capitalists economies, Europe and the US, it's low growth and stagnation and a very sharp income differentiation a shift - a striking shift - from production to financialization.
Noam Chomsky
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In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.
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...dissent, protest, presures of a wide variety that escape elite control can modify the calculus of costs of planners, and offer a slight hope that Washington can be compelled to permit at least some steps towards justice, freedom and democracy within its domains.
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If you want information about sports, I can tell you things from the 1940's, and the couple years that my grandson was kind of a jock, but nothing in between.
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If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.
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There is a big difference between tweeting to your friend about something that is happening and having a real personal relationship with people.
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As any good teacher knows, the methods of instruction and the range of material covered are matters of small importance as compared with the success in arousing the natural curiosity of the students and stimulating their interest in exploring on their own.
Noam Chomsky
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The Saudi, Arabian ruling class, for example, have rights because they are performing a service for Western power, ensuring that oil profits go to the West and not to the regional population. The local gendarmes like Israel, Turkey and so on have rights, at least in their ruling groups. Others do not.
Noam Chomsky
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Edward Said is a very honorable representative of the intellectual in the sense of the term that he defines.
Noam Chomsky