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Clinton, Kennedy, they all carried out mass murder, but they didn't think that that was what they were doing - nor does Bush. You know, they were defending justice and democracy from greater evils.

Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky
Age: 95
Born: 1928
Born: December 7
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More quotes by Noam Chomsky

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In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, '69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it's worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started - an outright war started in 1962.
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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.
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Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.
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The first commitment is raise your salary. One of the ways to raise your salary sometimes is to have short-term profits but there are many other ways.
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The actual consequences of Plan Colombia are to devastate peasant communities, which have been driven to drug production. These peasants have no particular desire to grow coca, but their other means of livelihood have been wiped out.
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It is reported that about 30% of the world's population is unemployed. That's worse than the Great Depression, but it's now an international phenomenon.
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The US is to an unusual extent a business-run society, where short-term concerns of profit and market share displace rational planning.
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The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it's likely to harm them.
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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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The tendencies are considerably weaker in the natural sciences, which, for the past several centuries, have survived and flourished through such constant challenge, and therefore, at best, seek to encourage it. Serving the status quo in political and socioeconomic realms is a different matter.
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CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That's one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They're similar societies and it's bad enough there, but here we're in the stratosphere. ] There's no particular reason for it.
Noam Chomsky
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The very idea that there should be a certain class of people who give orders by virtue of their ownership of wealth and another huge class who take on orders and follow them because of their lack of access to wealth and power, that's unacceptable. So, sure it should be abolished.
Noam Chomsky
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As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
Noam Chomsky
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Technologies can be liberating, but it can also be a tool of coercion and control.
Noam Chomsky
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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.
Noam Chomsky
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The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here.
Noam Chomsky
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Given their unusual privilege, Western intellectuals can realistically accomplish a great deal. The limits are imposed by will more than objective circumstances. And about human will predictions are without value.
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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I don't know what it means to say that 'the internet should have a voice in Washington'.
Noam Chomsky
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America has always been the richest and most secure, and sometimes the most dangerous country in the world. In the early years, the danger was to everybody near us, slaves, Native Americans, Mexicans. It finally expanded in 1898 to the Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines.
Noam Chomsky