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The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually 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
A. Noam Chomsky
Chomsky
Democracy
System
Talk
Less
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Ideals
Democratic
Usually

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I think the activism of the 1960s had a very definite civilizing effect on the whole society in all kinds of ways. So lots of things that by now are almost taken for granted were heretical in the 1960s. We had anti-sodomy laws until not many years ago.
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Governments are not representative.
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I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative.
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I didn't pay my taxes for years.
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America is a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment.
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Pakistan just cannot survive if it continues to do so (continue this confrontation with India).
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I see no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.
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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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Human needs are served by a sustainable lifestyle, almost by definition, if humans include coming generations. And a shift to such technologies as high-speed rail instead of maximizing fossil fuel use, and solar energy, is not relentless resource extraction.
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My feeling is that the Supreme Court reached a reasonable standard of protection of speech in the 1960s, a standard higher than any other country in the world, to my knowledge. In brief, speech should be protected up to participation in imminent criminal action.
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Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language.
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I am not too happy with terms like “the left”, to be honest. And I don’t use it much….if by “the left” you mean people who are committed to peace and justice and freedom and so on, there can’t be elements of the left opposed to workers’ movement, at least under that definition.
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If something is right (or wrong) for us, it’s right (or wrong) for others. It follows that if it’s wrong for Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and a long list of others to bomb Washington and New York, then it’s wrong for Rumsfeld to bomb Afghanistan (on much flimsier pretexts), and he should be brought before war crimes trials.
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When I am at home, I never watch TV, but when I am abroad in a hotel I take a look at the BBC to find out what's going on.
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With regard to freedom of expression there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it in favor of Stalinist/Fascist standards.
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I can understand the idea that there is a conspiracy. In fact, in much of the world there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense. They [CIA] created a monster and now they are appalled by it.
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Nothing is more inspiring to see how poor and suffering people, living under conditions incomparably worse than we endure, continue quietly and unpretentiously with courageous and committed struggle for justice and dignity.
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The idea that you have to drop any thing that you might be interested in doing because you have to pass that test tomorrow and it's something that you're not interested in, that's just the opposite of education. It's also harming teaching, because the teachers are evaluated by the results of the test.
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The missile defense component is a minor feature that nobody takes very seriously. Nobody really believes that the US is trying to protect itself from North Korea. That's not serious. But the militarization of space is quite serious.
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The British had an even stronger [then America] business interest in Nazi Germany. And Benito Mussolini was greatly admired.
Noam Chomsky